Abstract
We have watched rapid developments for branding in social media in the last couple of years and the use of these platforms is stronger then ever these days, reaching audiences worldwide through multiplatform social media branding strategies. Social media can be an opportunity for business to: raise brand awareness, increase sales, generate brand loyalty and to overall better communicate with customers, helping build long lasting relationships. With social media (e.g., Facebook, Twitter and Instagram), companies are able to interact and engage directly with customers. Customers can share knowledge with each other and can participate in on-going conversations with brands that are active in social media. This creates a whole new perspective in the way companies are used to conduct their businesses, and also on the way we are used to communicate with others and with companies themselves. This article provides for a literature review on the evolution of social media and how it became relevant to brands as a marketing tool to generate engagement.
Highlights
THE BEGINNING OF SOCIAL MEDIAJenkins characterizes social media as a convergence culture: it translates into media convergence, participatory culture and collective intelligence
When we think of social media we often think of social media platforms such as Facebook or Twitter, which are popular amongst most people, but we cannot forget that a wide range of social media technologies exist
McDonald (2007) affirms that the social media presence needs to be developed strategically to coordinate the different views of the organization, its aims and activities, in order to plan the different opportunities that arise in social media and social networking
Summary
Jenkins characterizes social media as a convergence culture: it translates into media convergence, participatory culture and collective intelligence. Media convergence altered the “relationship between existing technologies, industries, markets, genres, and audiences” and might be considered a paradigm shifting culture This altered the logic traditional media operated on and by which consumer’s process news and entertainment. Kaplan and Haenlein (2010) define social media as “a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of User Generated Content’’ It can describe different types of collaboration applications such as projects (e.g., Wikipedia); blogs/micro-blogs (e.g., Twitter); content communities (e.g., YouTube); social networking sites (e.g., Facebook); virtual game worlds (e.g., World of Warcraft); and virtual social worlds (e.g., Second Life). As shown on table 1, Li and Bernoff (2008) categorise different types of activities one can do in social media Those activities are: Create, Connect, Collaborate, Reach out, Organize and Consume. When one wants to organize content, one can use Digg, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon or Pinterest and ‘tag’ their pictures into different categories
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