Social Media Strategy for Online Service Brands Ziemianin, V
From Digital Culture & Society
Contents |
[edit] Social Media Strategy for Online Service Brands: Service Industries Journal.
Article Title:
Mills, Adam J. and Kirk Plangger. "Social Media Strategy for Online Service Brands." Service Industries Journal, vol. 35, no. 10, July 2015, pp. 521-536. Amanda Caron.
Find Article Online:
DOI: 10.1080/02642069.2015.1043277.
[edit] Context
Online shopping has become a massive trend within the digital era, and with active online shoppers means that brand building needs to be transitioned into a digital platform to help maintain customer loyalty and accessibility. Every brand needs to realize that social media is the new way of advertisement and one of the best ways to interact with potential customers or people who already use the merchandise. Through using social media, companies have created a new communication channel that helps nurture the brand, customer, and other relationship in between allowing companies to grow even to a global market from information they can retain throughout their online presence. “Some services, like banking and accounting, have generally seen an efficient industry-wide movement to the online environment via branded websites. Other services, like healthcare and law, are in a slower process of industry transition.” (Mills and Plangger, pg 521) “More than a third of 18-44 year-olds are social media users and consciously follow brands and brand pages on social media networks, and this percentage increases to almost three-quarters for users between the ages of 24 to 34 (Edison Research, 2012 )” (Mills and Plangger, pg528).
[edit] Overview
Many industries have been transitioning from traditional services to online services based solely on internet interactions. One of the main aspects that the article focuses on is “two- way communication between brands and customers”(Mills and Plangger, pg 522). This communication allows not only for brand-to-customer but also for customer-to-customer communication. For example, if a company posts a photo onto Instagram a customer is able to comment and have another customers/viewers respond or even the company has the ability to reply to their comment. Marketers of service brands are able to speak directly with customers online and immediately. Social media offers new and unique opportunities to build customer relationships online through the brand.
[edit] Strengths and Weaknesses
This paper has attempted to illustrate the role social media can play for online service brands not only as a promotional or communicative channel but also as part of an integrated marketing and customer relationship management strategy that can simultaneously engage and build relationships with customers. The article expresses that with the data companies collect from social media sites they can adjust their tactics to better their statistics. “Unique to social media, versus traditional media, is the ability to adapt and adjust media communications during the process of executing strategy; the ability to respond to and accommodate needs and desires is present in both content and context” (Mills and Plangger, pg 533). One of the strengths of this article is how Mills and Plangger approaches and introduces social media as online branding and official advertisements/company websites as offline branding due to the amount of engagement that is needed from the company to create the brand and maintain it to how customers use or see the brand. By creating four categories of social media regarding blogs, micro-blogs, video sharing, and social networking websites Mills and Plangger demonstrates how social media’s are complimentary to offline branding approaches. Through these four categories of social media, relationships are built through “a two-way communication route between the source of the marketing message and the recipient of the message” (Mills and Plangger, pg 526) through the comments and sharing people can do on posts. This article also goes into greater detail of how this two-way communication strategy can be beneficial for companies due to the exposure and new level of customer service it can give to followers or newcomers, which helps build loyalty and help cultivate and reinforce these relationships to grow further which can lead to even global expansion.
Whiled the articles main strength is how social media’s can help build a brand stronger, some of the weakness of this article is how Mills and Plangger did not actually identify clearly what the main social media's that companies actually use to build their brand; which are Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. This article would have benefited more with an analyzes done on each social media platform, and how marketing and brand building actually takes place instead of grazing over the topic of how Instagram is being used as a platform to sharing videos and pictures, Twitter is for micro-blogging, and Facebook as a social networking site. Highlighting these four social media platforms as active online brand building sources and highlight what other media offer in regards to being offline branding sources would have also been beneficial. Additionally, an analyzes on how offline branding is used at its full potential with social media sites like Wordpress (which you can also build websites on as well not just to build blogs).
[edit] Assessment
In conclusion, the articles does provide evidence of how powerful a two-way communication channels can be for marketers in order to reach new clients, produce quality products and services, and help maintain relationships with clients to build brand loyalty. It also identifies how now social media is equally as accessible as other no engagement medias such as print and television ads making social media branding just as an essential asset to running a successful business through the unique opportunities social media has to offer.
--Vz15kg 15:00, 8 February 2019 (EST)
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