Project Objective
This assessment unit will briefly analyse the usage and advantage of social media in business operations. The unit is also going to shed light on the disadvantage of social media platforms that negatively affect the business operations of any organization belonging to a different sector. Social media platforms are computer-based technology that allows individual from anywhere in the world share their information and ideas ultimately building a virtual community and network of sharing. It is internet based and facilitates its user’s ease of electronic communication of other content like photos, videos etc., and personal communication (Hudson et al. 2016).
Users are often engaging with social media features via Smartphone over web-based applications or software or computer, utilizing it for messaging and expressing their view on the certain product, services or personal consent etc. In context to this, this reporting unit will present a competitive analytical framework of social media with sentimental benchmarks that are used to glean organisation-specific marketing intelligence. Based on the proposed idea, new competitive analytics of social media with sentiments benchmarks could be developed to amplify marketing intelligence and find particular actionable areas in which organization are lagging and leading to improve customers experience using gleans of customer’s opinions from social media. Social media influence on promoting services and products, building a business relationship with customers and facility of social interaction on various e-commerce sites for amplifying customer’s base and financial profitability of business would also be analysed.
Project Objective
Project objective will represent the key indicators that could be used to assess project topic in detail. The project objective is-
- To understand the advantage of social media in a business context for improving brand promotion ultimately increasing customers base
- To analyse the disadvantage of social media in business
- To understand social media competitive analytical framework with sentimental benchmarks used to have company-specific marketing intelligence
- To analyse view and opinion of individual on social media for mining meaning data to understand market pattern and trend in organizational context
- To understand why the organization are using social media in business and what are the benefits of the usage of it they are getting
This undertaken project topic entitled to “advantage and disadvantage of social media in business” will enable its reader to clearly know about social media and its significant usage in the marketing of business products or services towards increasing market base and profitability of organization as a whole. Given rapid emerging advances in instant technology and communication, no business could afford to overlook the significant importance of social media. As internet users across the world use the social media platforms, they spend more of their time on various social sites for gathering quick information with easy. These features would enable readers to view social media utilization in business organization to leverage promotion of products, creating brand awareness, streamline for payments process ultimately growing a business network with qualified leads and generating a wide source of revenue from marketing programmes (Stephen, 2016). The project will allow readers to understand that as in future, the users of social media are only going to amply it will create important platforms for businesses to utilize the features of various online platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Linkedin (Figure 3) and Twitters to keep business products and services in front of potential and current customers under marketing actions. The project will also allow its reader to know the various important process of marketing on social platforms and its usage by firms for increasing brand and customer communication and several unique benefits for strengthening business operations.
Project Scope
Social media has drawn the significant attention of practitioners, scholars and business authority to understand the potential of respective platforms towards supporting the brand, customer service, sales and product development. Customers perceive online platforms like social media as trustworthy than other information that is sponsored by the company and frequently turning to social media for gathering information’s about services and products offered. Capitalizing on social media popularity and its perceived trustworthiness, much of organizations are initializing social media presence for engaging customers with brands and products (Siamagka et al. 2015). Evidence from empirical findings suggests that appropriate utilization of social media importantly benefits the organization. Social media generates higher purchase intention, brand attitudes than traditional digital media. It is particularly being used broadly as a marketing communication apparatus because of its potential in spreading the viral message. Within the organization, it has the potential to find capability, which could translate into benefits resources resulting in higher performance and competitive advantages (Fuchs 2017). Literature suggests that traditional and tribal metrics are becoming unsuitable for growing dynamic and interactive environment in a business context that could explain the tendency of marketers not to measure their effectiveness. Analysis of social media usage widely focuses on B2C context (Siamagka et al. 2015). A significant part of the internet in a B2B context highlights the importance of such tools in attracting new consumers and cultivating a positive relationship with current buyers facilitating relationship building. The B2B organization could implement three-valued added strategies while using the Internet that includes relational exchange, information-rich strategies and compiles learning strategies. Thus, it is apparent that the marketing process over social media commonly valuable and relevant in the B2B context in a B2C setting where the adoption rate has been slower for B2B companies.
Advantages of social media
Social media offers large benefits to the business organization in marketing their products and services in an excellent way to broaden their public exposure at a lower cost than any traditional marketing. Establishing product presence on broadly used platforms like Twitter (Figure 1) and Facebook (Figure 2) would help to target new consumers and improve the visibility of the brand. It also facilitates two-way communication for improving customer’s services and enabling businesses to have new information about their respective customers and modify communication on that information. Social media are a much cheaper way of marketing in context to the business operation than other traditional promotion and advertising activities also allowing to have a low cost of marinating social platforms. It could also boost traffic to business websites leading it to amplify online conversion like leads and sales along with improving brand advocacy and loyalty through delivering modifies standards customer services and effectively responding to their feedback. Social media in reference to the marketing of products and services of organization facilitates customers interaction platforms where positive feedback are public and could be persuasive to several other probable customers, and negative feedback would define areas of improvement in business. The advantage of social media in business also helps towards improving the ranking of products and services on search engines causing greater engagement of customers (Ashley & Tuten 2015). It also enables management authority of the organization to have better access to international markets and conduct research of market about their customers.
Literature Review
There is a large number of customers sharing their different experiences through several social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and other forums and blogs. It is becoming challenging for organizations to understand and monitor what individual post on social media sites. Conventional methods of content analysis are becoming ineffective to meet the needs of the organization to analyse a great amount of new content on a regular basis. Applications of the automatic method are much needed to the organization operating in present technological environment. As people continuously post textual details on several sites, there is increasing interest in using text mining, social network investigation and sentiment analysis method to process a wide number of user-generated data to pull out important informations and insight. In emerging technology, the process of text mining enables extracting meaningful information from unstructured textual data (He et al. 2015). Text mining focuses on analysing and finding useful trends, models, rules and patterns from formless textual data. Different from the traditional form of content analysis, the main aim of text mining initiates automatic extraction of knowledge, useful patterns, insight and trends from an offered form of the textual documents mining people’s opinion entitled to the reputation of products on internet sites. It has been found that the technique of text mining dramatically decrease cost and improves knowledge discovery from people’s opinion, compared to conventional survey methods. It also helps towards analysing the financial the report of the company predicting the future financial performance of the company to some extent as well. Major application of Text-mining also includes cluster analysis, information extraction, link analysis and categorization (He et al. 2015). Cluster analysis in return helps towards enhancing understanding of datasets and support effective decisions maa king within organizational context.
Sentiment analysis relates to the study of sentiments, emotions, opinions and subjectivity in text including conception detection of all these. It is mainly concerned with the automatic extraction of negative and positive opinions form texts of individual posting on social media platforms. It is useful in identifying the related polarity of sentiments expressed in the text that could be positive, neutral or negative. Sentiment investigation depends on automatic machine learning processes like Naive Bayes, Support Vector Machine (SVM), Matrix Factorization and Maximum Entropy that eventually categorize text into negative and positive grouping. There is amplifying demand of sentiment investigation approaches to identify user-generated data that could be ultimately used by businesses to understand customers perception and demand trends in reference to predicts and services being provided. The process helps towards understanding attitudes and behaviours of consumers and online active user’s specific subject like hotel services review, product review, financial blogs and relational statements (He et al. 2015). Sentiment analysis process in mining review of online user’s posts on various online platforms for business industry helped them to decompose review of users into five categories for measuring service quality showing the level of accuracy measuring services and capturing quality dynamics compared with existing text mining investigations. The results identified also helps towards extracting inventor’s sentiments in business concerning future returns, as financial instruments are useful towards stakeholders and other investments managers in the financial organization. This method of sentiment analysis will ultimately help business firms to identify and define several perspective ideas and suggestion for innovation from among a wide group of ideas (He et al. 2015). The company should pay specific and important attentions towards a method of sentiment analysis related to their products and brands in a virtual community of social media.
Advantages of Social Media
Competitive intelligence (CI), could be defined as the process of analysing and monitoring the competitive environment with an objective to offer actionable intelligence towards providing a competitive edge to the organization. It fundamentally works towards monitoring external environments of firms for gathering information relevant to process of decision-making. CI will allow business organizations to identify and define its rival weaknesses, strengths, other areas along with strategies to help the organization to improve do modification in its current strategic decisions against its rival/competitor. Techniques under CI tools include data analysis and data collection. Whereas, companies often utilize certain tools like web crawlers and web search engines for collecting data from blogs, web pages, online reviews, reports and emails using it to analyse data. The developed graphical models for extracting and visualizing comparative relation between the customer’s opinions and products on several social media platforms provide competitive intelligence identifying the process of the specific company delivering its product through several online platforms.
The utilization of the user-generated data in through social media provides a competitive advantage to the business organizations. These user-generated data provides companies to provide more specific target and need-based services. The additional advantage is being able to observe the services and products being provided by the competitors in their own social media pages. The customer relationships can be developed by using the interactive forum and chat boxes in the social media as well. This would provide the platform for the business organizations to develop more user-centric services and improve their business positions. However, the analytical data provided by the social media websites today do not provide the information regarding the customer sentiment. This may be troublesome since the performance of the product in the market cannot be known from these websites. The study conducted by Wu et al. (2014), presents the idea that the customer sentiment identification analytics can be added which will provide the business organizations to attract more customers in the short span of time. This will also provide a more intelligent approach to marketing strategies development in the social media websites. The target area which requires action can also be located, and strategies can be implemented to close the gap in such situations. The authors proposed a theoretical framework called VOZIQ which is an analytical tool used in the business analytics. This tool allows the business organizations to improve the customer experience by taking into considerations the experiences and sentiments. The authors used this tool to analyse the tweets in Twitter.com with respect to five retail companies.
Studies conducted on understanding the concept of social media in business context reveals that marketing process budget towards social media is growing consistently, suggesting that several brands are widely interested in establishing social media presence, interacting with its fans, shaping their understanding and leveraging their voice for creating marketing impact. This reallocate towards social media explained various factors:
- Development of technology: This has included the wide development of IT infrastructure, increasing online usage/users and new tools contributing to the attractiveness of social media.
- Decreasing response rate: Consumers are increasingly becoming ignorance of the traditional marketing process that includes e-mails and banner advertisements due to span and disinterest (Tsimonis & Dimitriadis 2014).
- Customer preference: individual customers prefer social media content more trustworthy provide by their friends or other internet users largely than companies information.
- Demographic shifts: Individual especially young people have shifted from online, and use of conventional media channels has reduced.
- Low cost: Viral organization could produce more engagement of customers rather than any television promotional campaigns at much of lower cost rate (Scott 2015).
The study proposes that mainly two reasons this internet in an online brand area that included market research and word of mouth. In addition, the rise of internet media facilitated the improvement of word of mouth occurring on several online platforms like forums, blogs, social networks and virtual community. Social media arise as a standard tool for word of mouth where users create and spread brand information’s freely over their networks consisting of large groups of friends (Tsimonis & Dimitriadis 2014). Secondly, social media also provides the new opportunity for interaction with customers opening a new opportunity for marketing researchers to get close to customers and have information about their desires, preference and needs. The proposition of related study on expected benefits, motivation and goals related to usage of social media summarised as follows:
- Organizational firms could reach out to an individual unlike before. Social media spreads content to a much diverse range of individuals compared to mass media. It creates a “little world” network easily distributing contents to a large group of people; a network is structured through voluntary connection, requiring less process for information sharing (Kumar et al. 2015).
- Social media relations boost sales. By enabling individual visiting business brand page in social media, it is much likely to produce traffic for websites towards making increased online sales. For example, Sony announced in 2012 February; it has earned extra million pounds in sales through social media platform like Twitter including Dell as well which has earned a profit of 3 million dollars increased sales (Tsimonis & Dimitriadis 2014).
- Social media raise and establish brand awareness. It facilitates tools that allow business firms to access millions of individuals in a fraction of seconds. A large number of individuals are daily visiting social media; the presence of brand’s name could help business for informing people about their firm and ultimately creating awareness of the brand.
However, due to constant evaluation of platforms conferring to social media and several multiple application tools it offers, business organizations are consistently experimenting it impacts by testing several ways of implementing social media and analysing their usage by rival companies as well. Besides benefits to the functions of the firm, there is also the existence of some concerned risks to its usage. One of the most unpredictable situations includes negative Facebook comments posted by users. Studies show that many companies often delete a negative comment of individual form business sites and neglecting any respond. Moreover, even if some business firms respond to some comments, they do not imply an explicit strategy that transforms these comments into some useful opportunity for communication (Tsimonis and Dimitriadis 2014). Ineffective and unmeasured handling of this situation or comments could lead to negative word of mouth among users of social media eventually affecting the perception of customers related to specific products and services. As a result, it could arise as challenges for companies towards developing a proper response strategy to negative comments, which could cause an adverse impact on sale and brand image of the firm businesses.
While the implication of social media in business is proving to be a powerful tool for marketing, it is not at all risk-free. Social media allows followers and fans to freely post their view and comments exposing business towards possible negative publicity (Fuchs 2015). Quick action on this could help to minimize damages because of these comments, but it will not erase criticism from organization’s feed or page. Hacker’s poses another threat on social media to business offering and operations where hackers could Take-over Company’s feed and pages sharing false new and information hampering reputation of the company that could go viral in a few minutes. Even, large and respected business has been victim to hackers thus towards this small business should necessarily have security precautions creating passwords and sharing coded language within employees of the organization. Social media is intimate and requires regular monitoring if there is any failure to managing online presence the business could not see real benefits. Not having clear social media and marketing plan could result in a decrease of business benefits. Another disadvantage of social media marketing in a business context that it requires committed resources to manage social presence, producing new information and answering to feedbacks (Hajli, 2014). This could also include training and hiring of staffs, expense in the paid advertisement along with paying for the price of creating brand images content or videos. Marketing through social media also indicates risk and threat of inappropriate and unwanted behaviour on sites indulging harassment and bullying. Thus, it is essential for businesses to implement effective and strong social media strategy, preparing policy and execution process before could help to manage risks. Misleading and false statements given on social media platform by business or by customers could lead to consumer law.
Conclusion
As the usage of social media for the marketing of business helps in offering related to its products and services to its customers, therefore they are becoming widely popular and cost-effective method of promotion and adverting. Social media play an important role in increasing brand image and organizational profitability ultimately increasing financial performance and customer base of specific business operations operating in various sectors irrespective of their business size (Jones, Borgman & Ulusoy 2015). A business could set up its presence easily on various social media platforms while giving investment of efforts and time in order to gain customer base worldwide. As though positive comments related business products and services work towards effectively influencing customers perception ultimately increasing sale, it could also be observed that ineffective handling of negative comments leads to negative impression where business could lose its followers, potential customers and losing fans. Thus, it could be concluded that before applying various frameworks related to evaluating sentiments, mining opinionated text and competitive intelligence and analysed over social media in businesses, the company must consider their resources to ensure that they could provide frequent communication and attention necessary for embracing a platform of social media effectively.
Reference List
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Fuchs, C., 2015. Social media and the public sphere. TripleC: Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society, 12(1), pp.57-101.
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He, W., Wu, H., Yan, G., Akula, V. and Shen, J., 2015. A novel social media competitive analytics framework with sentiment benchmarks. Information & Management, 52(7), pp.801-812.
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Kumar, A., Bezawada, R., Rishika, R., Janakiraman, R. and Kannan, P.K., 2016. From social to sale: The effects of firm-generated content in social media on customer behavior. Journal of Marketing, 80(1), pp.7-25.
Scott, D.M., 2015. The new rules of marketing and PR: How to use social media, online video, mobile applications, blogs, news releases, and viral marketing to reach buyers directly. John Wiley & Sons.
Siamagka, N.T., Christodoulides, G., Michaelidou, N. and Valvi, A., 2015. Determinants of social media adoption by B2B organizations. Industrial Marketing Management, 51(1), pp.89-99.
Stephen, A.T., 2016. The role of digital and social media marketing in consumer behavior. Current Opinion in Psychology, 10(2), pp.17-21.
Tsimonis, G. and Dimitriadis, S., 2014. Brand strategies in social media. Marketing Intelligence & Planning, 32(3), pp.328-344.
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