engleski

Towards a typology of social media strategies

Social media are acquiring an increasing importance among brands’ marketing strategies. The memberships of various online communities have expanded so much that they can no longer be ignored and the amount of time that consumers spend on different platforms is progressively increasing. Also, the variety of activities that are taking place in online communities, represent an important opportunity for the brands to relate to consumers in different ways and on the other hand a threat, if they decide to ignore consumers’ opinions, requests or comments, as that alienates them and creates a gap between the brand’s projected image and consumers’ expectations. However, despite the increasing use of social media and its managerial implications, little research has addressed social media strategies or examined the factors that determine the success of such strategies. For the most part, empirical research that has examined social media strategies has focused on providing “how to” advice and explaining the planning process (see for example Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010), rather than developing and evaluating specific strategy types. The main purpose of the paper is to present a review of the literature with a focus on social media strategies as the basis for the development of a social media strategy typology. Developing such a typology can benefit researchers from various disciplinary perspectives such that the classification system might be used as a foundation for theory construction or empirical evaluation of various strategy types and their impact on performance. We first present a general framework of social media, its definition, specificities and use. Next, we present an overview of existing social media strategies as the basis for the identification of domains that are crucial for the development of a typology of social media strategies. Finally, we discuss the implications and future research directions.

social media ; strategy ; typology

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