Nowadays, social media are the current trend and more and more companies are implementing social marketing strategies. The thesis discusses the potential, opportunities and advantages of social media. Special focus is on the specifics of marketing in the tourism and travel industry. The goal of this thesis is to analyze and to assess the true potential in order to form recommendations aimed for the involved tourism and travel businesses.

The purpose of this study is to gain more understanding of how companies use social media to strengthen and personalize their brand. This through the following questions: How do companies use social media to personalize and strengthen their brand? How is the brand affected by being available on social media? This study is a qualitative research with a deductive approach. The empirics are collected through case studies and semi-structured interviews. The companies in this study all had the aspiration to personalize their brand through their communication with their customers, by being personal and informal. They use Facebook for brand awareness and advertising, while Instagram is their channel for brand-building to portrait their own brand image.

<p>With the increased use of social media as a marketing tool, marketing strategies and the way brands communicate with customers is changing. Due to its low cost and characteristic short length of messages, Twitter is an especially beneficial marketing tool. Twitter is free and consists of making posts that are easy to compose and easy to consume, which makes it an ideal way for companies, such as startups, to reach customers without having to use many resources. However, companies should be strategic in their use of Twitter and no data exists on the best practices for startup companies as they develop Twitter marketing plans. This study sought to address this issue and explored different methods for engaging followers and which of these methods were the most effective for technology-oriented startups to use. A content analysis revealed that engagement tools, such as media, hashtags, URLs, and mentions serve their intended purpose for tech startups and were related to engagement. However, using conversational, two-way communication, as suggested by marketing companies and literature, proved to not be positively related to engagement rates. One-way, promotional language that is typically advised against was more related to higher engagement. Thus, startup tech companies should continue to prioritize engaging followers with engagement tools but should focus on non-conversational topics, such as their products, events, news, and updates.</p>

abstract: Digital media refers to any form of media which depends on electronic devices for its creation, distribution, view, and storage. Digital media analytics involves qualitative and quantitative analysis from the business to understand users’ behaviors. This technique brings disruptive changes to many industries and its path of economic disruption is getting wider and wider. Under the context of the increasingly popular digital media market, this dissertation investigates what are the best content delivery strategy and the new cultural phenomenon: Internet Water Army. The first essay proposes a theory-guided computational approach that consolidates distinct data sources spanning unstructured text, image, and video data, systematically measures modes of persuasion, and unveils the multimedia content design strategies for crowdfunding projects. The second essay studies whether using the Internet Water Army helps sales and under what conditions it helps. This study finds that the Internet water army helps product sales at both post-level and fans-level. The effect is largely reflected by changing the number of emotional fans. Furthermore, the earlier to purchase the water armies, more haters, likers, and neutral fans it can attract. The last essay builds a game model to study the trade- off between honestly promoting the product according to their evaluation and catering to the consumer’s prior belief on the product quality to stay on the market as long as possible. It provides insights on the optimum usage of promotion on social media and demonstrate how conventional wisdom about negative reviews will hurt business may be misleading in the presence of social media. These three studies jointly contribute to the crowdfunding and social media studies literature by elucidating the content delivery strategy, and the impact and purchasing strategy of the Internet Water Army. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Business Administration 2020

The aim of this work is to summarize the current possibilities and used approaches in the field of online marketing, and the possibility of their aplication on selected www pages. The goal is to present an approach for raising the marketing effectives and strength of a web page and increasing so its viewer rate. The work discusses the methods used in the process of online marketing analysis and the planning of online marketing strategies. The work also focuses on the field of social media marketing.

Background: The widespread use of social media has offered brands a great opportunity to engage with their customers and promote sales. In China’s mobile gaming market, the huge user base of social media marketing provides companies with an excellent opportunity to develop their brand image and cultivate further awareness. However, the research regarding social media marketing’s influence on mobile game’s brand equity is still limited from a literary perspective. Purpose: Firstly, the research aims to identify the factors of social media marketing that influencing mobile game companies’ brand equity. Secondly, this research will evaluate the importance of identified impact factors. Method: In order to investigate the research subjects and answer research question properly, the positivism research paradigm has been implemented in this research. In addition, the deductive reasoning approach is applied to formulate and test hypotheses to generate reliable results with a high level of generalization and prediction. The theoretical foundation of this research has been formulated through the frame of reference. Then, the quantitative research methods were applied to the collection and analysis of the data. The primary data has been collected through a survey and the samples have been randomly selected. The main method for the data analysis was regression analysis. Conclusion: In general, the research has demonstrated that social media marketing is a useful tool to develop brand equity for mobile game companies in the Chinese consumer market. Brand popularity and information quality are considered the most important influential factors of social media marketing on mobile game company’s brand equity in China.

Användningen av influencers på sociala medier har kommit att bli en populär strategi imarknadsföringssyfte bland företag i många olika branscher. Företagens användande avkända personer i marknadsföringssyfte är ett sedan länge tilltaget begrepp, men under det senaste decenniet syns influencermarknadsföring tillträda som ett alternativ till traditionell celebrity endorsement och är en stor del av den digitala marknadsföringen som görs idag. Influencers kallas de personer som besitter förmågan att influera andra människors beteende och köpintentioner. Trots att många företag idag implementerat influencermarknadsföring is in övriga marknadsföring saknas idag strategiska ramverk för beslutsfattande och utvärdering av influencersamarbeten. Syftet med denna studie var därför att undersöka förhållandet mellan köpare, det vill säga företag, och säljare, i.e. influencer för att sedan utreda hur företag värderar och utvärderar influencers i samband med ett samarbete. Denna kvalitativa studie undersöker marknaden för influencermarknadsföring och dess aktörer samt värdeutbyten. Vi utreder hur företag värderar och utvärderar influencers genom semistrukturerade intervjuer för att ta reda på hur det ideala samarbetet kan se ut och vilka aspekter som behöver förfinas eller tilläggas i processen. Tresvenska och ett amerikanskt detalj- och modehandelsföretag, samt fyra svenskamikroinfluencers intervjuades. Därefter gjordes en sammanställning av resultaten i kombination med tidigare forskning och sekundärdata. Resultaten visar att mikroinfluencers fördel på marknaden ligger i deras förmåga att skapatilltro hos konsumenten vilket i sin tur förbättrar köpintentionen. Det framkommer även att mikroinfluencers genererar förhållandevis bättre engagement rate än makroinfluencers, då följare upplever mikroinfluencern som personligare och mer lättillgänglig. Vidare visarstudiens resultat på en trend hos företagen som tyder på att betalda samarbeten är ett fenomen som är på väg att försvinna för att ge plats åt gifting, som innebär att influencern genomförsamarbetet i utbyte mot produkter istället för pengar. Förslag på vidare forskning är att genomföra ytterligare intervjuer med influencer som har en större följarskara då denna studie endast samlar empiri från mikroinfluencers. Ytterligare ett sätt att vidare undersöka influencers värdeaspekter är att kombinera den nuvarande studien med kvantitativa experiment som till exempel insamling av influencerdata. / Influencer marketing is a prevalent way of marketing today and has been for the last decade, with digital usage continuing to grow in terms of social media. Although this not so new form of digital marketing is a must for companies to interact with consumers every hour of the day, discussions are being held about influencers efficiency compared to their high cost. This qualitative study examines the market for influencer marketing and its participants and pinpoints how companies value these digital opinion leaders that supposedly connect with consumers in a personal and transparent way. The purpose of this study is to gain insight and understanding in how the market is today and how the future of influencer marketing will be, to see that value aspects are defining the ideal influencer candidate from acompanies point of view. Three swedish and one american retail and fashion companies were interviewed about their decision making process when working with influencer marketing including how they find the right influencer and what variables they find valuable seeing to the influencers qualities. In addition four swedish micro influencers were interviewed on the same themes as the companies, except the questions were answered from their perspective to gain insight from another angle of the influencer marketing sphere. This essay is written in Swedish and seven out of eight interviews were held in Swedish. The results showed the power of the influencer is paradoxically decreasing as the phenomenon is growing and companies are showing hesitancy against engaging in paid collaborations. The findings also showed that gifting, whereas companies still work with influencer to spread their commercial message but the payment consist only of free products, is becoming a more desirable way to market their brand due to the low costs and risks. The companies were under the impression that gifting micro influencers instead of engaging in paid collaborations with micro och icon influencers led to the same conversion rate because the smaller size influencers had better engagement with their followers. Suggestions for further research is to implement interviews with influencers of a wider range of follower amount, since this study only included micro influencers with 8000 followers at most. Another way to further examine the value aspects of the influencer and its effectiveness is to combine this qualitative study with quantitative experiments in form of tracking influencers statistics.

Background: To date, there have been several studies conducted on how social media marketing affects customer loyalty. However, they have been narrowed down to specific areas, such as luxury fashion, the airplane industry, and so on. Therefore, there is a literature gap on how social media marketing affects customer loyalty in general. This research seeks to fill that gap though investigating how certain characteristics of social media marketing activities affect customer loyalty in general. Purpose:  The purpose of this paper is to describe the effects social media marketing has on customer loyalty. Methodology:  This research will be conducted by gathering quantitative data through a cross-sectional research design. A survey was performed based on the theoretical concepts in the theoretical framework, which seeks to test the relationship between the independent variables and the dependent variable. An operationalization was created to showcase the theoretical grounds for each question, where each question is bound to a concept/variable. Students in ages 18-30 were used to define the sample population for this research. Conclusion: The purpose of this paper was to describe the effects social media marketing has on customer loyalty. Due to H1 and H2 being approved, and H3 and H4 being rejected, this paper provides evidence that there is a significant positive impact of the SMMA characteristics of entertainment and interaction on customer loyalty. It was also established that there were two SMMA characteristics that did not have a significant positive relationship with customer loyalty; trendiness and customization.

ABSTRACT Background: The marketing efforts made by firms have been forced to change dramatically during the past year as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic. Online communication and social media platforms have seen a boom in users and firms have been forced to switch both their sales and marketing efforts to the online world. By applying the definition and observable characteristics of Social Media Marketing Strategies (SMMS) in combination with Consumer Engagement Theory, the authors of this paper aim to explore which strategies have been applied by three IKEA Instagram accounts and how social media users are reacting to these applied SMMSs in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Problem: It has previously been suggested to conduct further studies on the combination of social media and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) in order to help firms develop stronger and more meaningful consumer relationships. Researchers further suggest that there is a current research gap regarding the factors which might influence user-generated content (such as comments), positive Word of Mouth (WoM) and brand engagement among social media users. Further it was recognized that social media reaches across national borders which leaves room for cross-cultural research to be made on the following consequences.  Purpose: The exploratory purpose of this study aims in developing a deeper understanding of the applied SMMSs by firms and the resulting consumer engagement as well as social media user’s reactions to those strategies. Research Questions: “What social media marketing strategies (SMMSs) are IKEA applying during the COVID-19 pandemic?” and, “How do social media users respond to IKEA’s social media marketing strategies (SMMSs) during the COVID-19 Pandemic?” Method: With a relativist ontology and social constructionist epistemology, the study inductively explores the SMMSs applied by three Instagram accounts from the retailer IKEA in Australia, UK and Sweden. Through a case study-approach and the application of qualitative content analysis, the accounts have been analyzed and coded separately by two independent researchers. Intercoder reliability was measured between the researchers through Cohen’s Kappa. The findings from each case were then compared in a cross-case analysis. Practical Implications: This research will help marketing managers by providing insights into how consumers respond and perceive different SMMS during the COVID-19 pandemic and to enhance their consumer engagement by adapting an appropriate communication strategy to reach their business objectives. Result and Conclusions: Within the chosen timeframe of 6 months during COVID-19, the analyzed IKEA accounts applied disparate SMMS, namely, ‘Social Commerce Strategy’, ‘Social Content Analysis’ and ‘Social Monitoring Strategy’. The Instagram users' reactions differed across the three accounts, where the strategy which received the most positive consumer reactions, as well as the highest level of consumer engagement, was the ‘Social Content Strategy’ which was applied by IKEA Australia. Thus, the findings suggest that the three Instagram accounts apply unique SMMSs adapted to each country and thus achieve distinctive results in terms of consumer engagement.

There is no doubt that Covid-19 has affected the world on several different levels. However, it is less clear how the wellness industry has had to adapt to the Government's and the Public Health Agency's recommendations and restrictions. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate how gym companies have adapted their marketing mix and their social media marketing as a strategy for taking social responsibility during the Covid-19 pandemic. Empirical information has mainly been collected through interviews with respondents from Nordic Wellness and Studio Aktiverum, which are two different gym companies in Sweden. They have been interviewed about aspects of their attitude towards Covid-19 and their use of social media. Data has also been collected through observations and information on the company's social media platforms. A mixed method was used to link the empirical findings to the theory. The authors of this thesis discovered 5 different themes, namely, measures - training, customer response, challenges and opportunities, marketing communication and finally training support. The overall picture showed that the case companies were hit hard by the crisis, but that they still managed to continue their business by adjusting their marketing mix. Social media has been a useful tool for the case companies as they have been able to market their activities and offers, which has been especially valuable during times of crisis when budgets and income are lower.