Social media is a very important marketing channel for marketers. Marketing through social media can easily enhance the effects of viral marketing or accelerate the word-of-mouth effect. How small e-stores and startups that lack marketing resources conduct their online marketing strategies and overcome their marketing weaknesses are the points of interest in this research.
This research examines how new online shops implement marketing strategies using social media. Our samples come from the E-commerce Idea Competition of 2009 and 2010. The students who participate in this competition only have two months to operate their online stores so that they can be taken as typical samples of new online shops. We encode 141 online shops¡¦ contents, including their final reports and website contents of blogs, Facebook, micro-blogs and YouTube. We use the content analysis method to analyze the dimensions of product information, trust messages, promotions, interactivities, multimedia contents and brand stories.
This research is to answer two research questions. The first research question asked is how small e-stores implement their marketing strategies using social media. The findings show that information is exposed more completely in blogs because of the students¡¦ familiarity with blog platforms and the variety of information that it can handle. Promotions information such as special offers is the most commonly used information pattern on social media.
The second research question is how the e-stores enhance and overcome marketing weaknesses in using social media. We found out that trust messages are seldom used in social media and only a few promotions skills were used. These are caused by the time constraints and the unfamiliarity with social media.
From the results, it was shown that these students used very limited resources in implementing their marketing strategies. Analyzing the contents of the social media can give us a better understanding of the behavior and strategies of small e-stores and startups. To overcome these weaknesses, it is suggested that the features of the social media they want to use be studied first and to reduce the numbers of social media usage to become more familiar with the social media platform.
The current study found what the operating characteristics of small e-stores and startups are and some suggestions are given to strengthen their weaknesses and establish long-term businesses. We hope that these suggestions can be applied to the e-commerce environment so that future startups can have a better working understanding of marketing using the social media.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:NSYSU/oai:NSYSU:etd-0727111-023931 |
| Date | 27 July 2011 |
| Creators | Wang, Chien-Hsiang |
| Contributors | Teng-Hu Su, Fen-hui Lin, Hsin-hui Lin |
| Publisher | NSYSU |
| Source Sets | NSYSU Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lib.nsysu.edu.tw/ETD-db/ETD-search/view_etd?URN=etd-0727111-023931 |
| Rights | user_define, Copyright information available at source archive |
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