Digital Marketing: Social Media And Social Networking

“The term digital marketing has evolved over time from a specific term describing the marketing of products and services using digital channels – to an umbrella term describing the process of using digital technologies to acquire customers and build customer preferences, promote brands, retain customers and increase sales” (Financial Times, lexicon.ft.com; P.K.Kannan Hongshuang “Alice” Li 2017). Following the American Marketing Association's firm centric definition (https://www.ama.org/AboutAMA/Pages/Definition-of-Marketing.aspx), digital marketing may be seen as activities, institutions, and processes facilitated by digital technologies for creating, communicating and delivering value for customers and other stake-holders. For the purpose

According to Wikipedia (2016b), social networking services could be identified as “an electronic service, application, platform, or site used by individuals who have a common interest, beliefs, attitudes, culture, activities and really life relationships (Ali Abdallah Alalwan et. el 2017).Where as contrary to this as communication tools wikepedia (2016b) defined social media as such they enable individual to broadcast as well as to approach more people and more influence on them (Ali Abdallah Alalwan et. el 2017). Thus, Wells (2011) considered “social networking as the use of social media means to directly contact and have interaction with personnel whom that one have a real relationship with or he or she would like to have a contact with”(Ali Abdallah Alalwan et. el 2017). Increasingly, social media are largely considered by modern business as promising platforms to conduct the promotional activities as to effectively communicate with the targeted customers (Popp and Woratschek, 2016; Harrigan et al., 2017; Gao and Feng, 2016; Kohli et al., 2015). Facebook has reported its revenew from advertisement in 2016 has been 26.8 Billion USD which is 57% more compared to year 2015 as it was 17.07 Billion USD (MENLO PARK 2017). This increase clearly indicates the shift from conventional media to digital media by organisations in recent years and also the higher

Consumers are now participating actively with the firms in co-creation of products/service using their personal experiences (Berthon et al. 2012; Hanna, Rohm, and Crittenden 2011; Reimann, Schilke, and Thomas 2010; Trainor et al. 2014). This shift/change in customer behaviour is enabling the firms to be more custome/firm interacted by deploying modern technologies and by developing new capabilities (Trainor 2012; Trainor et al. 2014). Since new emerging concepts like “social customer” and “creative customer” are posing a challenge for practitioners and researchers to reconsider the meaning of managing customer relationships as these two above customers produce much more value added content in social media (Berthon et al. 2012; Greenberg 2010). Thus CRM has been broadened in its limits because of new capabilities brought by technological developments and social shifts that has been brought by social media networking (Zhan Wang