The last thirty years there has been a dramatic change in relationship marketing. The use of computers connected to the Internet at work places has increased over time and social media is widely used in marketing strategies. Social media is a new phenomenon to communicate with each other, it enables market information based on individual consumer’s experiences. Therefore managers are seeking a way to incorporate social media into their strategies, but this is more common within B2C than B2B. The purpose is to investigate the potential for industrial corporations, within the warehousing industry, to use social media for maintaining established relationships within B2B, as a part of their marketing strategy. The primary data is collected by qualitative interviews with relevant corporations. The study includes four corporations within the industrial industry, an illustrative corporation that have issues regarding using social media or not, and one expert interview.  The secondary data is collected from previous research, articles and journals. From the theoretical framework and empirical research, it seems to be more useful for corporations acting in the market of B2C rather than in B2B to use social media. Major of the interviewed corporations were thinking of using social media as a part of their marketing strategy, but almost no one were using it as a tool today. The younger generation, raised in a technological society, seem to generally have a broader knowledge of social media and what advantages and disadvantages the use can lead to. From this thesis it does not seem that one social media is better than another since different social media platforms are used in different ways. Therefore, it is not possible to say that one specific social media suits all corporations. However, if a corporation decides to use social media as a marketing tool, they need to be aware of the time required for it and be prepared for negative effects since they are open platforms, free for everyone to express their feelings. Within B2B, the trend of having a personal relation with customer and supplier is very strong and social media can never replace this personal relationship. The conclusions and recommendations is instead to use social media as an integrated marketing tool within their strategy.

Considering social media’s widespread marketing possibilities this study aims at investigating consumer engagement across YouTube, Facebook and Twitter and how luxury fashion brands can produce such activities on their corporate social media pages. Through applying a mixed method combining both social media data collection together with conducting a content analysis, both quantitative and qualitative measurements were attained. This to provide a deeper understanding when analyzing actual consumer engagement efforts and what role brands’ content strategies play in encouraging these activities. The results confirmed some expectations of the heterogeneous nature of social media as the level of consumer engagement showed to vary notably between both platforms and brands. More so, the results in the current study were not able to confirm any great effects of firm engagement having a direct effect on consumer engagement, instead response and interaction seems to be strictly related to content and product factors. In turn, these factors in relation to aspects such as the psychological state of mind, social, emotional and behavioral aspects showed to be encouraging added consumer engagement.

abstract: As an outlet of communication between internet users, digital social media has created opinionated engagement between people that have similar and often contrasting views, just like those in face-to-face communication (Mckenna & Bargh, 2014). The problem is that these digital conversations occur in a synthetic environment, causing users to develop alternative psychological patterns of engagement (Lauren & Hsieh, 2014), that could potentially push them to inadvertently or unknowingly create and participate in negative social interaction with others. The purpose of this study was to determine and assess the needs of a writing heuristic for social media participants to use in engagement with others to increase coherency, civility, and engagement response in content. Research explored existing literature on engagement behavior in digital social media and computer-mediated communication (CMC) and was then used in qualitative sentiment analysis of business-to-consumer social media environments, aiming to recognize the needs in developing a social media writing heuristic. This research found that such heuristic should prompt and advise users to remove ambiguity within engagement practices, encouraging the implementation of salient social markers and nonverbal cues in text. Social media users should also be prompted to create familiarity with others through the posing of messages in an emotional frame that is aligned with their audience’s emotional attitudes, increasing persuasive argumentation and discussion. As well, users should be prompted to thoroughly understand the issues in discussion and follow dynamics to create productive engagement, while avoiding engagement with negative commentary. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Communication 2016

The purpose of this research was to understand the creation of a brand composed of four individual elite athletes and how stakeholders involved used social media to co-create the brand. The study examined the unique context of the FAB_IV; four individuals divers branded as a team. Semi-structured interviews were performed with participants from Diving Canada, its athletes, member of the COC and sponsors. The sample was built through a purposeful and snowball sampling method that added to stakeholders identified from the literature. Archival data of organizational documents, FAB_IV microsite, social media accounts, news outlet content and online content were also gathered in order to complement the data from the interviews. The deductive and inductive data analysis highlighted four main themes: brand strategies and implementation - sponsorship and sponsorship activation - media and fan interest - stakeholder’s relationship. Specifically regarding social media, the research showed that in order to use social media as a brand co-creation tool, organizations and athletes need to have a strategy in place, use them with consistency and be creative in what they publish. Additionally, fostering relationships with followers was identified as a key contributor of building a brand on social media. Researchers and future researches should focus on organizations who, along with their stakeholders, are using social media as the main tool to co-create their brand. Moreover, having the fan or follower perspective, when doing a research pertaining to brand and value co-creation on social media, would also be a possible avenue for future researches.

Sociala medier fyller idag upp en stor del av människornas vardag och med sociala medier kan företag nå ut till en stor mängd människor på ett relativt enkelt och snabbt sätt. Användningen av sociala medier för företag har blivit ett ”måste” när det kommer till att synas, marknadsföra och komma ut med information. Det handlar även om att skapa en relation med sina konsumenter och bygga ett förtroende. Syftet med den här uppsatsen är att identifiera användningsområde, fördelar och nackdelar vid användning av sociala medier för restaurangbranschen i medelstora orter. För att identifiera detta har datainsamling genomförts genom kvalitativa intervjuer med fyra olika restauranger i Karlstad. Resultatet av studien visar att sociala medier används främst för informationsspridning till sina gäster och följare. Restaurangerna vill snabbt och enkelt komma ut med information till sina gäster och följare, det kan vara allt från tillfälliga öppet tider till att sprida information om en nyinkommen vinsort i vinlistan. Studien visar även att den största fördelen är även den största nackdelen med sociala medier, nämligen tvåvägskommunikationen. Att gästerna och följarna numer inte enbart är mottagare av information utan även kan skapa och sprida information är en fördel. Däremot kan de som enbart är ute för att skada restaurangens rykte lika enkelt skapa och sprida information om restaurangen, nämligen troll. Dessa troll har restaurangerna ingen kontroll över. Så länge det är befogade kommentarer är det värdefull kritik för restaurangen. Gäster och följare kan även bidra till att sprida restaurangens varumärke genom funktionerna gilla, kommentera och dela.

To date, the rather new phenomena known as Social Media Marketing (SMM) has caught much attention from researchers and several studies have been conducted prior to resolving how this new phenomenon can be utilized by business-to-business (B2B) organizations. However, existing literature covering SMM has been mainly focused on the business-to-consumer (B2C) perspective, therefore, there is a lack of research in the utilization of SMM in a B2B context. Hence, this bachelor thesis aims to contribute to the theoretical and empirical findings of social media in a B2B context, by uncovering marketing decision-makers point of view and how they work with social media, specifically in the international high-technological and service-oriented sector. The purpose of this research paper is to identify and describe the utilization of SMM together with the positive and negative aspects of it in the B2B context, based on empirical data collected from decision-makers working with marketing, operating in service-oriented international IT-organizations located in Sweden. In order to fulfil the purpose, a qualitative research method was chosen where 7 semi-structured interviews were conducted with marketing decision-makers from 6 international service-oriented B2B companies operating in the IT industry. The decision-makers participating in the study contributed with their experiences and perceptions of social media, concluding that they highly values SMM and emphasizes its importance as it is perceived as significant for all B2B organizations today and as the society is becoming more and more digitized, it will become of even higher importance in the upcoming years. Further, the thesis also found that the decision-makers working with SM use it for three main objectives; Brand awareness, Lead generation and Employer branding. Lastly, based on the empirical findings of this report, some similarities and controversies were discovered in regard to how theory suggests that SMM is used in the B2B environment as well as how the different participants view the usage of SMM.

Thesis (M. A. (Media Studies)) -- University of Limpopo, 2022 / Social networking became a common international trend which has spreads and reached almost every corner of the world. The use of social media platform has developed and exploded into an online platform where individuals can generate content, share it, bookmark it and network at an enormous rate. Amongst the users of social media, students and youth are the main users of social media sites. The research explored Facebook as a tool for improving marketing services at University of Limpopo. Institution of higher learning utilise Facebook for various reasons such getting more followers, maintain existing relationship between the university and its audience and also to communicate with the university audience. Social media can have a great impact on the university and its audience depending on the usage as a two-way communication platform. The main objectives of the study are to identify the manner in which institutions of higher learning use Facebook for marking purposes; examine the performance of Facebook for marketing; and establish the challenges and opportunities of using Facebook as a marking tool. The study employed Nick Couldry’s practice theory and Marketing communication mix theory which are highlighting the relationship between the media, people and organisations. The study also analysed other literature that supports the aim and objectives of the study. A qualitative method was used in the study and results obtained through the use of online observation and semi-structured interview. Content and thematic analysis was applied to analyse the data collected. The population used as a sample were marketing and communication department employees at the University of Limpopo who are working with the university social media pages. With online observation of the University of Limpopo’s Facebook page the findings show that the university’s social media portray specifically Facebook as a one-way communication which they convey messages on the platform without taking into consideration the comments, criticism and queries of the students or audience at large. The empirical findings of the study indicate that Facebook is the most used social media platform at the University of Limpopo. Moreover, participants have highlighted that the purpose of all social media platforms are used to market the institution and as platforms to convey messages to their followers, staff members and university community. v The findings expose the various opportunities and challenges in using social media. However, it is proved that the opportunities outweigh the threats. Some institutions of higher learning use more than one social media platform. However, Facebook was proven to be the most widely used social media followed by YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.

Background: Social media platforms changed completely the manner in which companiesinteract, communicate, promote their products, and create brand awareness. Such platforms areused as a means of communication among users for acquiring information, discussing products,and reflecting on brands. Even though social media is advantageous to both firms andaudiences, it can be an ineffective marketing strategy due to problems of transparency andincompetence. Luxury fashion brands including Balenciaga as well as Dolce & Gabbanaembrace social media when going for promotion and engagement but have recently had massivecriticisms due to controversial advertisements.Purpose: This research seeks to explain how the brand images of luxury fashion brandsBalenciaga and Dolce & Gabbana are affected by the backlash on social media marketing,particularly looking at how negative reactions can have an impact on brand reputation andconsumer-brand relationships.Method: A qualitative method with an inductive approach conducted through semi-structuredfocus groups with customers and protentional customers of the examined brands.Conclusion: Social media backlash negatively affects luxury brands Balenciaga’s and Dolce& Gabbana’s brand images

The rise of social media has significant implications for the advertising industry, particularly for the relationships between marketers, consumers and advertising agencies. In fact, the entire advertising landscape has been developing in response to the emergence of digital technologies and advertising media, and the roles of these key stakeholders of the advertising industry and how they perform in the social media era are still not clear. Most previous research on this topic has focused on Western countries and adopted a macro perspective. In contrast, this study contributes to knowledge by focusing on an Asian context, and by exploring how social media are shaping the working lives of individual creatives who play a key role in the development of creative ideas and their expression across an increasingly diverse range of media. This study aimed to explore how and to what extent the work roles and identities of Hong Kong-based advertising creatives are changing in response to the rise of social media. As the study focused on creatives’ experiences, a qualitative, interpretive approach was taken. This involved 32 interviews with advertising creatives in agencies differing in size, digital focus and ownership, supplemented with participant observations in both a multinational full-service advertising agency (Agency-M) and an independent Hong-Kong digital agency (Agency R). The study has provided insights into creatives’ perspectives on their roles, identities, skill-sets and beliefs in relation to the rise of social media, and on the ways in which their relationships with clients and agency colleagues were changing as social media became more important. In particular, the study identified three key experiences of Hong Kong advertising creatives in relation to the rise of social media. First, they were found to have divergent role identities linked to their identification with traditional and digital communication agencies. Second, the rise of social media led them to experience new tensions in their relationships with clients. Finally, across both traditional and digital agencies in Hong Kong, the role of advertising creatives is beginning to transcend the digital/traditional distinction. This new hybrid role was found to involve creative switching between three identities over the course of the advertising development process: creative strategist, creative facilitator, and creative producer. Each of these role identities required more from them than the merging of ‘digital’ and ‘traditional’ creative skills; in particular, the creatives increasingly found themselves having to work closely with a broader range of stakeholders within and beyond their own agencies, requiring them to develop their interpersonal and negotiating skills. This research contributes to understanding the role and role identity in creative industries. It explores the many ways that social media are shaping advertising creatives’ working practices and identities, and it highlights the importance of cultural context to advertising practice. The triadic structure of contemporary Hong Kong advertising creatives’ roles identified here has implications for theorising advertising creativity, agency practice, and social media as a catalyst for individual and organisational identity and practices in the creative industries. The findings also have implications for advertising agency structure and practices, within and beyond the creative department.

Background: To align with the new trend of using social media in the marketing mix, product placement has been adapted to social media platforms as one strategy to create attention. Especially on Instagram, product placements have gained popularity among companies. While scholars have focused on measuring the effectiveness of the strategy, suggesting that credibility is one component necessary for success, a gap in the research is illuminated when focusing on what makes a product placement on Instagram credible. Previous studies regarding credibility and its relation to traditional media have concluded that there are some factors essential in consumers’ credibility evaluation process. Since social media differs from traditional media, there was a need to investigate the applicability of credibility to the social media platform Instagram. Purpose: The purpose of this thesis was to examine key factors of product placement on Instagram that influence credibility. Method: To meet the purpose of this thesis a study with a mixed method research design was conducted. The qualitative data was collected through semi-structured interviews with the intention to discover how consumers evaluate credibility. The scales and items developed from the findings of the qualitative study were tested using a questionnaire to identify which factors that have the most influence on consumers’ credibility assessment. Conclusions: The overall findings indicate that consumers evaluate credibility based upon source, message and receiver characteristics. The empirical evidence suggests that the Expertise of influencer, Professionalism of picture, Trustworthiness of influencer, Connection to influencer and Causes of irritation are the factors that have the most influence on consumers’ credibility assessment of product placement on Instagram. The findings further implies that it is not only the factor itself that influence, credibility can additionally be transferred from one factor to another.