The thesis examined the phenomenon of micro-entrepreneurship, social selling and relationship management on WeChat. I used autoethnography as my research methodology, and the findings contribute to academic area on social selling, micro-entrepreneurship, social marketing, relationship management, and strategic communication. This paper also explored how WeChat users conduct their management strategies and relationship marketing in the common Chinese culture background. Findings revealed that WeChat is an ideal social selling and marketing approach for Chinese individual sellers to accomplish their business goal.

This research aims to facilitate sales personnel and companies in understanding the interrelation of personal branding within sales and how it should be utilized effectively. Thus, the thesis explores how sales personnel develop and communicate their personal brand, and additionally how personal branding relates to social selling in a B2B context. Using a qualitative approach, the researchers conducted semi-structured, in-depth interviews with nine participants to achieve meaningful insights about the topic. The research utilizes a deductive approach and a form of directed analysis where the findings are closely related to the conceptual framework (Figure 1). It was found that authenticity is a major aspect when communicating a personal brand. This is since supporting other salespeople, offering expertise, and creating relationships were essential. Furthermore, findings regarding the development of a personal brand indicated changes in professional and personal life as prominent factors. The discoveries reported that processes such as self-reflection and idea-batching, in which values are at the core of evolving the personal brand, can be beneficial. Moreover, the study identifies how personal branding relates to social selling in a B2B context. The researchers found that personal branding can form the base for successful social selling in terms of the connection between the two concepts. It was indicated that social selling would function as a Pull-strategy when incorporating a strong personal brand. In summary, this thesis offers insightful information on the essential function of personal branding for sales personnel and businesses in the B2B context, elucidating the development and communication of a personal brand and its relationship with social selling.

The availability of prospective customer information present on social media platforms has led to many marketing and customer-facing departments utilizing social media data in processes such as demographics research, and sales and campaign planning. However, if your business needs require further filtration of data, beyond what is provided by existing filters, the volume and rate at which data can be manually sifted, is constrained by the speed and accuracy of employees, and their digital competency. The repetitive nature of filtration work, lends itself to automation, that ultimately has the potential to alleviate large productivity bottlenecks, enabling organizations to distill larger volumes of unfiltered data, faster and with greater precision. This project employs automation and artificial intelligence, to filter Linkedin profiles using customized selection criteria, beyond what is currently available, such as nationality and age. By introducing the ability to produce tailored indices of social media data, automated filtration offers organizations the opportunity to better utilize rich prospective data for more efficient customer review and targeting.

This study is using an inductive explorative approach to investigate how micro-enterprises within the marketing consulting industry collect and use data for the purpose of increasing sales. A micro-enterprise is considered to be a company that employs no more than 10 people and/or whose annual turnover is no more than 2 million EUR. The research applies the concept of social selling and development of emergent technologies to understand the methods used by examined salespeople within the marketing agencies examined, and to answer the research question: How is customer data from social selling used among micro-enterprises within the marketing consulting industry to build and retain customer relationships? The following paper suggests that social media is used by the seller with the aim of identifying common grounds between buyer and seller, in order to create a personal bond that sets a strong foundation for continuing the relationship long-term. However, it also indicates that social selling activities are used in various ways and in combination with traditional data collection. Even though usage of customer data has been a heated debate over the years, the results of this study point to the fact that the concerns of collecting and utilizing data in regard to customer privacy, are limited among micro-enterprises within B2B-sector. Additionally, the study addresses advantages and disadvantages with the size of being a micro-enterprise related to the methods of social selling.