Using Social Media to Reach Consumers: A Content Analysis of Official Facebook Pages

Abstract

ABSTRACTWhen discussing advertising and marketing strategy today the discussion would be incomplete without considering the use of social media. What is social media and why should companies be considering establishing a presence in social media? The number of people who use social media is always growing rapidly. Given this tremendous growth, companies are scrambling to try and figure how to utilize social media to reach the millions of consumers who use it on a daily basis. This paper examines how companies use social media in their marketing and advertising strategy by content analyzing the official Facebook pages of 70 global brands. It appears that companies have recognized the need to establish a presence in social media but use a variety of approaches with their Facebook pages.INTRODUCTIONWhen discussing advertising and marketing strategy today the discussion would be incomplete without considering the use of social media. What is social media and why should companies be considering establishing a presence in social media? Social media refers to tools where content, opinions, perspectives, insights, and media can be shared ... (and) at its core social media is about relationships and connections between people and organizations (Nair, 2011, p. 45). These tools include blogs, widgets, discussion boards, wikis, vlogs (video logs), consumer product rating sites, chat rooms, and social network sites. Social media is becoming increasingly widespread and popular with consumers. Social network sites, which are the focus of this study, allow users to create profiles on the site, to post information and share that information and communicate with other users of the site (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010). As of July 2011, the social network site Facebook claims to have over 750 million members and in terms of activity There are over 900 million objects that people interact with (pages, groups, events and community pages), the average user is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events , the average user creates 90 pieces of content each month and more than 30 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each month. (www.facebook.com). The social network site Linkedin had over 100 million members worldwide as of July 2011 (www.linkedin.com).Social media is changing how individuals communicate with each other. Social media is highly interactive and users share and process information with others (Aula, 2010). It is also changing where and how consumers spend their time. Consumers are accessing social media on their desktops, laptops, and mobile devices. Given this tremendous growth, companies are scrambling to try and figure how to utilize social media to reach the millions of consumers who use it on a daily basis. Social media is unstructured and is focused on generating conversation and building community and may also have an influence on purchase decisions (Nair, 2011).While academic research exists on individual consumers of social media there has not been extensive academic research on what companies are actually doing in social media. Parise et. al. (2008) interviewed executives about their use of social media tools to generate some suggestions on how get the best results from social media. Jansen et. al. (2009) evaluated the content of posts or tweets on the micro-blog Twitter on corporate accounts and discovered that consumer purchases are influenced by web communications and social media. They also recommend microblogging as an opportunity for building brands and for developing relationships with customers. Colliander & Dahlen (2011) compared consumer reactions to blogs and online magazines and found that consumers exposed to information on blogs and stronger brand attitudes and higher purchase intentions. Phan (2011) investigated the use of social media for thirteen luxury fashion brands to determine if having a presence in social media influenced consumer perceptions of the brands and determined that social media had no impact on consumer purchase intentions or reputation. …