Social Media Strategy for Online Service Brands Obano, O

From Digital Culture & Society

Article Title: Adam J. Mills and Kirk Plannger (2015). "Social Media Strategy for Online Service Brands". The Service Industries Journal, 35:10, 521-536

Find article online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/02642069.2015.1043277?needAccess=true

doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/02642069.2015.1043277

Contents 1 Context 2 Overview 3 Strengths and Weaknesses 4 Assessment

[edit] Context

This article focuses on how major companies use social media platforms to their advantage to expand their business and build brand awareness . This is great for businesses because they get the chance to promote themselves on many different platforms and gain exposure for their company to gain potential customers. Each company uses social media in such different ways and it is neat to see how each company uses each different platform to their advantage.

[edit] Overview

The connection between business and marketing is always developing, marketing your business correctly is the key to a company's success. Depending on the type of company, there are different types of marketing that are necessary, but every company can use social media marketing. In the article by Mills and Plannger, the authors stated “Dell has tapped the power of social media with its hugely popular IdeaStorm website, where users add thoughts for new creation lines and enhancement, choose them up or down, and comment on submission. Because of the site, Dell has ongoing to ship computers with Linux install, and has added community carry” (p.4445).This is an example of a major company that has utilized the power of social media marketing and used it to their advantage. Burger King on the other hand, has taken a different approach to their use of social media.The authors stated that “the burger chain offered Facebook users a free Whopper coupon if they would "unfriend" 10 of their social network connections” (p.4445). Each company is using social in such a diverse way that caters to their unique customer base. If companies continue to integrate social media into their marketing strategies and budgets, they will continue to reach a number of consumers that has not been seen before.

[edit] Strengths and Weaknesses

The first strength of this article is a quote where the authors state “social media is about ordinary people taking control of the world around them and finding creative new ways to bring their collective voices together to get what they want” (p.4452).This quotation embodies what social media is about, creativity, a number of businesses use this creativity to draw in consumers to their business. Another great aspect of this article besides showing what platforms companies use to their advantage, it also goes over all of the different platforms/applications that can be considered social media and how they help businesses if they market using them. It goes over the features certain applications have, such as Facebook, and how companies can use them. For example, Facebook has promotions, crowd sourcing, check-ins, games, and social shopping. One of the best free marking aspects of Facebook to me is check-ins because customers get the chance to share that they were at your establishment and all of their friends are able to see that and possibly help your business reach new customers.

A great aspect to this article is that they took common social media platforms and showed a percentage of who are using them. The highest being Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. They oddly did not show Instagram. The article also goes into detail about blogging and the benefits of them for social media marketing, “Blogs influence roughly one in five readers at important purchase decision stages… blogs help consumers discover products and services, refine choices, get support and answers, and decide on a specific product or service.” (p.4446) The article also touches on the idea of, “interacting with or attracting the interest of current or prospective customers through the channels of social media” (p 4451), which is one of the greatest aspects of social media. Companies are able to interact to potential customers through using social media. The article also broke down the benefits and uses or each type of social media and went over thirteen different types of applications that can be considered social media. While goes over all of the different social media platforms the article also goes over important information on how each platform can benefit your business. For example when discussing media sharing sites they expressed that, “ Online marketing is about providing current and potential customers with interesting, informative content. This includes images. Because many photo sharing sites are free, a business's biggest investment is time.” (p. 4448)

[edit] Assessment

Throughout the article I was very surprised to only have Instagram mentioned once, and briefly. Instagram is one of the main applications where small businesses do their marketing. It is a free app and enables businesses to post and reach out to anyone they desire. Instagram is one of the best ways to interact with your potential customers because you can view their profile, like their photos/ comment on them, or respond to their comments on your own post. Lastly, the article did reference some outdated information that is off topic. For example, Facebook taking over MySpace statistics is not very relevant to the point of the article. Since MySpace is not used anymore, it should not have been in the article.