Social Media as a New Market

By: Laryzza Aliah G. Toquero

Over the years communication has evolved into a revolutionary platform, through the
invention and development of Internet. The Internet has evolved from a means to
facilitate data, to a platform of public communication through social media. Social media
has opened up a plethora of opportunities for businesses to advertise, promote and market
themselves to customers.

In an era where technology prevails, entrepreneurs as well as marketers see the need to
keep up with the fast pace of change or risk being outdated. Businesses may use social
networking sites and integrate these tools into their marketing and recruiting efforts.
Businesses should consider the primary goal of their social networking strategy before
diving into the social media chaos.

According to Boyd & Ellison (2007), Social networking sites allow individuals to
construct their profile within a bounded system, share with other users and view and
traverse their list of connection sand those made by others within the system. Thus in a
sense, it is easily to interact others and communicate within the system.

Social media revived more ancient types of decision-making prevalent before the
emergence of mass media, when the exchange of opinions between one’s families,
relatives, friends, and neighbors was the basis for product purchase decisions. As the
digital version of word-of-mouth, social media represents the materialization, storage,
and retrieval of word-of-mouth content online. However, the large-scale, anonymous,
ephemeral nature of the Internet induces new ways of capturing, analyzing, interpreting,
and managing social media content. Some traditional theories, such as social exchange
theory, social penetration theory, and social network theory, could be valid paradigms for
studying and explaining how people form networks, express their opinions, and pass
information to each other.

In a sense, social media began on May 24, 1844, with a series of electronic dots and
dashes tapped out by hand on a telegraph machine. In the 1980s and ’90s, according to
“The History of Social Networking” on the technology news site Digital Trends, the
internet’s growth enabled the introduction of online communication services such as
CompuServe, America Online, and Prodigy. They introduced users to digital
communication through email, bulletin board messaging, and real-time online chatting.
 Buckner’s (1965) theory on rumor transmission indicates the accuracy and speed of
rumor passing were affected by the structure of the network and the mental sets of
individual actors in the network. This chapter will focus on the review of relevant
theories, the construction of an integrated meta-framework, and, more importantly, the
implication on hospitality and tourism marketing research and the principles of marketing
hospitality and tourism businesses through social media.

A successful social media campaign requires more than just whipping up posts daily.
Even with increased social media awareness, 47 percent of marketers find it hard to
develop successful social marketing strategies. The 7Ps is a core marketing theory, so it’s
not unusual to find several businesses use it as a foundation for their marketing strategy.

Monitoring and facilitating customers interaction, participation and sharing through

digital media to encourage positive engagement with a company and its brands leading to
commercial value. Interactions may occur on a company site, social networks and other
third party websites. (Chaffey. D, 2002)

A social network is a specific kind of network where nodes are social entities (Van den
Bulte & Wuyts, 2007). Nodes or entities are called actors. Actors are linked by social ties
or relations. Social ties have a number of properties including directionality, reciprocity,
strength, and homophily. Directionality refers to the flow of direction between nodes.

Gunelius (2011) defined social media marketing as any form of direct or indirect
marketing that is used to build awareness, recognition, recall, and action for a brand,
business, product, person, or other entity and is carried out using the tools of the social
Web, such as blogging, micro-blogging, social networking, social bookmarking, and
content sharing.

(Mabry, 2010). By using social media as a marketing tool business can integrate
community marketing and learning from online user behaviors to engage, share and drive
conversations with customers and partners online (Brown, 2010). Social media is a
complementary extension of all marketing efforts. Social media is more of a mindset
than a true channel (Evans, 2010). Social networks and social media are
permeating society more and more every day. In fact, recent research has revealed that
the scope of social networks spans much of the globe and is comprised of more than just
Facebook, Twitter (Twitter.com, 2010), blogs, YouTube and Flickr (Solis, 2010) (as cited
in Dickey & Lewis 2010).

By using social media as a marketing tool business can integrate community marketing
and learning from online user behaviors to engage, share and drive conversations with
customers and partners online (Brown, 2010). Social media is a complementary extension
of all marketing efforts. Social media is more of a mindset than a true channel
(Evans, 2010).

Given that all social media are dependent on users providing content, an understanding of
the motives of why individuals participate appears fundamental. Social exchange theory
originated from sociology studies exploring exchange between individuals or small
groups. The theory mainly uses a cost-benefit framework and comparison of alternatives
to explain how human beings communicate with each other, how they form relationships
and bonds, and how communities are formed through communication exchanges.

Properties of social networks include transitivity, density, and closure. Networks high in
transitivity are those for which ties stress reciprocity. Networks are said to be dense if a
high proportion of actual to possible ties exists. Closure means the density among those
in a network with whom an actor has a tie.

The use of social media to commercially promote processes or events to attract potential
consumers online is referred to as social media marketing (SMM). With the immense rise
in community websites, a lot of organizations have started to find the best ways to utilize
these sites in creating strong relationships and communications with users to enable
friendly and close relationships to create online brand communities (Ibrahim and Aljarah,
2018).

An actor’s importance in the overall network is measured by centrality. Degree centrality

is the number of ties an actor has. This can be measured as out-degree versus in-degree.
Closeness centrality is how close an actor is to each of the other actors in the entire
network such as the “degrees of separation”. Eigenvalue centrality measures the extent to
which an actor with high prestige is connected to others with high prestige. Finally,
centralization reflects the importance or prominence of the actors in the network. A
centralized structure means that the network is organized around focal actors (Van den
Bulte & Wuyts, 2007).
 It involves online activities in which the user contributes to content creation. This
media encourages user involvement which can be as simple as posting comments or
giving votes or as complex as recommending content to other user on the basis of
preferences of people with similar interests and lifestyle. Thus social media can be
described as a broad term inclusive of activities where people create content, share it,
bookmark it and network at a phenomenal rate. On the other hand social networking sites
are a place where in one forms communities of interest to connect to others. Social
networking sites utilize social media technology to connect with people and build
relationships. Social networking sites allow individuals to construct their profile within a
bounded system, share with other users and view and traverse their list of connections
and those made by others within the system (Boyd & Ellison, 2007).

Social media has become prominent in the 21st century. Companies are persistently
looking for ways to utilize this new platform within their marketing strategies to increase
business growth. people are more likely to share and experience they have had with a
business rather than sharing sales or promotions a business is offering. According to the
results from this study, purchasing behavior is more likely to have a positive effect for a
business when using social media platforms for marketing strategies.

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