EXPLORING THE EFFECT OF FACEBOOK AS A RELATIONSHIP MARKETING TOOL: THE CASE OF LITHUANIAN TELECOMMUNICATIONS INDUSTRY

Abstract

In today’s competitive business environment greater numbers of companies are searching for sustainable competitive advantage by building long-term relationships with their customers. This study focuses on relationship marketing, marketing tool Facebook and its subsequent impact on the business performance. The existing literature highlights the importance of customer retention and the long-term relationships between the company and the customers. Social media and social networking sites with vast marketing capabilities are being quickly identified and adopted by successful companies. However, there is a lack of research in this area, especially identifying the implications Facebook can have on relationships between company and its customers. Consequently, this research aims to identify the uses of Facebook as a marketing tool in building and enhancing relationships with loyal customers. The primary objective of the study is to identify to what extent Facebook affects the relationships between loyal customers and company. In order to achieve research objective a highly structured questionnaire has been selected for the descriptive quantitative study. The study was conducted and primary data was collected in March – June 2011. While existing literature emphasises the importance of relationship marketing and the need to utilise new technological advantages for building and enhancing relationships with loyal customers, the primary research reveals controversial results. The overall trend is the customers have quite low level of loyalty to the telecommunications companies and they are not interested in committing to one service provider and creating long-lasting relationship. This study contributes to existing literature on relationship marketing and social networking sites and gives a broader outlook into these concepts by looking into Facebook as a relationship marketing tool. The findings of the study add more debate on Facebook as a relationship marketing tool and its effectiveness since the research partly denies the need of long-term relationships between companies and their customers