Social media strategy for online service brands. Rustenburg, J

From Digital Culture & Society

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.

Find article online:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02642069.2015.1043277

doi:

10.1080/02642069.2015.1043277

Context:

This article focuses on social media strategies for online service brands. Many in-person services are changing their ways to include online marketing. Marketers of service brands are able to speak directly with customers, online and immediately. Social media offers new and unique opportunities brand to customer relationships online. Social media offers challenging and potentially valuable opportunities that were previously unavailable to marketers through offline channels. The article highlights a “two- way communication between brands and customers”(Mills & Plangger, 2015, p.522). This communication allows not only for brand-to-customer-to-brand, but also customer-to-customer communication.

Overview:

The authors argue that “from a marketing perspective, branded website/applications and branded social media channels should be treated as distinct, albeit complementary” (p. 521). This paper illustrates 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 because social media is always active. Companies have the opportunity to reach many more customers if they move their services to online. “More than a third of 18–44-year-old social media users 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 and 34 (Edison Research, 2012 )” (p. 528).

The key to successful strategies is to integrate all communications on various channels (p. 531). The authors offer “a nine-step ongoing process of examining, planning, and implementing strategic opportunities for fostering relationships between online service brands and their customers on social media” (p. 531).

Strengths and Weaknesses:

The following are the strengths of this article: The authors use comparison. They have identified the types of businesses that use social media and how they benefit most from it. “Some services, like banking and accounting, have generally seen 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” (p.521). The authors use data to back up their claim of why to use social media marketing by demographics, showing the increasing volume of people following online brands.

There is a strategy that companies follow, e.g., to post during certain days at certain times. When businesses have a huge following, they most likely have various followers viewing their posts continuously. The authors have identified the types of businesses that use social media and explained how they benefit most from it. They have included an ongoing process to follow for planning and implementing social media. This article goes over all of the main points that have to do with the benefits of why companies should do their marketing on social media and have their services accessible online. The article includes benefits of customer data collection. By using data collection from social media sites companies can adjust their tactics to better their approach. “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” (p.533). Companies have a faster reaction to customer interaction with them.

Following are the weaknesses of the article: Overall the main focus of this article is on why companies should be marketing on social media and not how. The article does not cover any of the content that companies should be posting, but rather the pros of using social media and all of the different platforms. The article also does not touch on what is a good way for services to move to having an online presence.

Assessment:

This article is a good place to begin for people planning and implementing social media online. This article should be used for someone else’s research project along with other further research that covers details that this article omitted. I am suggesting that a social media company could use this article to set up social media online for clients, or for use by the businesses to set up their own social media marketing online. I advise that the planning stage for an online social media strategy should be complete before it is implemented. Therefore identifying the type of business it is for, what to post, e.g., pictures and content, training people who post it, and where it will be posted. This includes technical training and whether space is allocated on a dedicated company domain or a free site will be used such as WordPress or Wix.

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Jr97ah 10:58, 15 February 2019 (EST) Jrustenburg