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IN DEGREE PROJECT MEDIA TECHNOLOGY,SECOND CYCLE, 30 CREDITS
, STOCKHOLM SWEDEN 2017
Create, maintain and reap the rewards of a social media strategy.
Skapa, underhåll och skörda belöningarna av en social mediestrategi.
NIKLAS GUSTAVSSON
KTH ROYAL INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGYSCHOOL OF COMPUTER SCIENCE AND COMMUNICATION
Create, maintain and reap the
rewards of a social media
strategy.
Skapa, underhåll och skörda
belöningarna av en social mediestrategi.
Student: Niklas Gustavsson, [email protected]
Submitted for the completion of the KTH programme; Civil engineer in Media Technology,
Master of Science in Media Technology.
Supervisor: Christopher Rosenqvist, Stockholm School of Economics, Department of
Marketing and Strategy.
Examiner: Haibo Li, Royal Institute of Technology, CSC School of Computer Science and
Communication, Department of Media Technology and Interaction Design.
Work commissioned by: Marvelous Sweden
Date of submission: 2017-06-14
Abstract This report analyzes the effects that social media marketing has on companies who choose to
invest in a social media strategy. Previous research has looked at separate parts of a social
media strategy, but no holistic view of the entire life cycle of a social media strategy has been
created. Further, this report looks at what companies who choose to invest in a strategy gain
from it in terms of different sources of business value.
Advertising over digital media has increasingly taken market shares from more traditional
advertising such as print, radio and TV. A large portion of this digital advertising is done
through social media in the form of directing content at a specific target audience using the
various social media platforms marketing algorithms. This increase in digital advertising is
coupled by more companies choosing to create a social media presence. However, often have
these social media presences failed to net any results due to a lack of understanding of the
social media environment and how the consumers use the platforms.
A case study was conducted on Marvelous, a Nordic digital agency specializing in social
media. The case study also analyzed one of Marvelous’ clients who has invested in a social
media strategy through them. The reason for this case study was to see how social media
marketing is done in practice by a leading company within the industry. To complement the
case study and get a less nuanced view of the development of a strategy and the results of it,
qualitative interviews were held with other industry professionals who have worked with
social media for several years.
The results show that the life cycle of a social media strategy is made up of six stages: the pre-
assessment stage, the strategy creation stage, the basics & hypotheses stage, the maturation &
capitalization stage, the short-term evaluation stage and lastly the long-term evaluation stage.
These different stages help companies in creating a strategy to guide social media efforts
sustainably over a long period, leading to economical sustainability of the companies through
granting advantages such as increased brand strength, increased sales and reaching a new
consumer basis amongst other advantages. These advantages are gained while simultaneously
strengthening the bond between consumer and company through the two-way communication
that social media has enabled.
Sammanfattning Denna rapport analyserar effekten som marknadsföring via sociala medier har på företag som
bestämt sig för att investera i en social mediestrategi. Tidigare forskning har utforskat olika
delar i en social mediestrategi, men ingen holistisk vy av hela livscykeln har skapats. Vidare
så tittar denna rapport på vad företag som har investerat i en strategi får ut av det i form av
olika källor av affärsvärde.
Marknadsföring över digitala medier har ökat och fortsatt tagit marknadsandelar från mer
traditionella källor såsom print, radio och TV. En stor del av denna digitala marknadsföring
görs via sociala medier genom att rikta ett budskap mot en specifik målgrupp med hjälp av de
olika sociala plattformarnas marknadsföringsalgoritmer. Denna ökning av reklam via digitala
medier syns även i form av att fler företag väljer att skapa en närvaro på sociala medier.
Däremot så misslyckas ofta denna sociala närvaro att gynna företag på grund utav en brist på
kunskap om det sociala medielandskapet och hur kunder använder dessa plattformar.
En fallstudie gjordes på Marvelous, en nordisk digitalbyrå som specialiserar sig inom sociala
medier. I denna fallstudie undersöktes även en av Marvelous kunder som har investerat i en
social mediestrategi via dem. Anledningen till denna fallstudie var att se hur denna
marknadsföring görs i praktiken av ett ledande företag inom industrin. För att komplettera
fallstudien och få en mindre nyanserad bild av utveckling av en strategi och dess resultat så
utfördes även intervjuer med andra experter inom industrin som har arbetat med sociala
medier i ett flertal år.
Resultaten visar att en livscykel för en social mediestrategi är uppgjord av sex skeden:
förhandsbedömning, strategiskapande, etablering och hypotesprovning, mognads- och
kapitalisering, kortsiktiga utvärderingar och slutligen långsiktiga utvärderingar. Dessa skeden
hjälper företag att skapa en strategi för att vägvisa deras insatser på sociala medier hållbart
över en lång period vilket kan leda till ekonomisk hållbarhet för företagen. Detta genom
fördelar såsom ökad varumärkesstyrka, högre försäljningsgrad, att nå ut till en ny kundbas och
andra fördelar därtill. Dessa fördelar fås medan företagen samtidigt stärker bandet mellan
kund och företag genom den tvåvägskommunikation som sociala medier har möjliggjort.
Acknowledgements I would like to thank Christopher Rosenqvist at Stockholm School of Economics, SSE, for
helping me with this thesis as my supervisor. Christopher’s help and expertise on the subject
has been crucial for this thesis. This paper would not be what it is today without him.
Second, I would like to devote a special thank you to Lisa Rytter who has been my supervisor
at Marvelous and has helped me tremendously. I would also like to thank the Stockholm and
Copenhagen offices of Marvelous for the help and guidance which they have provided me
during these weeks.
Another thank you goes out to the six interviewees who helped me by sharing their expertise
on the subject and expecting nothing in return. The shear amount of knowledge that the six of
you possess is beyond fascinating.
Lastly, I would like to thank my friends and family for supporting me during these weeks.
Table of Contents 1 Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 1
1.1 Background ...................................................................................................................... 1
1.1.1 About Marvelous ....................................................................................................... 2
1.2 Research questions ........................................................................................................... 2
1.3 Purpose and objectives ..................................................................................................... 2
1.4 Delimitations .................................................................................................................... 2
1.5 Report disposition ............................................................................................................ 3
2 Theory ..................................................................................................................................... 4
2.1 Social Media ..................................................................................................................... 4
2.1.1 Social media definition .............................................................................................. 4
2.2 Social media usage ........................................................................................................... 5
2.2.1 The general public’s social media usage ................................................................... 5
2.2.2 Social media usage for businesses ............................................................................ 6
2.3 Social media strategy ....................................................................................................... 7
2.3.1 Considerations necessary when creating a social media strategy ............................. 8
2.4 Social media marketing .................................................................................................... 9
2.4.1 Consumer-brand relations ....................................................................................... 10
2.4.2 User-generated content ............................................................................................ 11
2.4.3 Word of mouth marketing enabled by social media................................................ 13
2.4.4 Social media marketing evaluation ......................................................................... 14
3 Methodology ......................................................................................................................... 16
3.1 Literature study .............................................................................................................. 16
3.1.1 Purpose of method ................................................................................................... 16
3.2 Case study of Marvelous ................................................................................................ 16
3.2.1 Interview with Marvelous’ head of social in Denmark ........................................... 17
3.2.1 Finding a relevant client .......................................................................................... 17
3.2.2 Information retrieval about the client ...................................................................... 17
3.2.3 Data analysis of the client ....................................................................................... 18
3.3 Interviews with industry professionals ........................................................................... 19
3.3.1 Interview questions ................................................................................................. 19
3.4.2 Interviewee selection ............................................................................................... 20
3.4.3 Interview process and analysis ................................................................................ 20
3.5 Choice of methodology .................................................................................................. 21
4 Results ................................................................................................................................... 22
4.1 Case study of Marvelous ................................................................................................ 22
4.1.1 Introductory interview with David Ledstrup ........................................................... 22
4.1.2 Analysis of Marvelous’ client ................................................................................. 24
4.2 Interviews with industry professionals ........................................................................... 37
4.2.1 Reasons and goals for investing in a social media strategy .................................... 37
4.2.2 Strategy creation process ......................................................................................... 38
4.2.3 Evaluation of strategy .............................................................................................. 39
4.2.4 Advantages of social media marketing ................................................................... 40
5 Discussion and analysis ......................................................................................................... 42
5.1 Social media – the essential addition to the marketing repertoire .................................. 42
5.2 Social media strategy life cycle framework ................................................................... 43
5.2.1 Full framework ........................................................................................................ 43
5.2.2 Common mistakes to avoid while developing a strategy ........................................ 44
5.2.3 Pre-assessment stage ............................................................................................... 44
5.2.4 Strategy creation stage ............................................................................................ 45
5.2.5 Basics and hypotheses stage .................................................................................... 47
5.2.6 Maturation and capitalization stage ......................................................................... 47
5.2.7 Short-term evaluation stage ..................................................................................... 47
5.2.8 Long-term evaluation stage ..................................................................................... 48
5.3 Advantages of a successfully executed strategy ............................................................ 48
5.4 Sustainability and ethics ................................................................................................. 49
5.5 Method criticism ............................................................................................................ 50
6 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................. 52
6.1 Main research question ................................................................................................... 52
6.2 Additional research questions ........................................................................................ 52
6.3 Future research ............................................................................................................... 53
7 References ............................................................................................................................. 54
8 Appendix ............................................................................................................................... 58
8.1 Appendix A – Interview with the client’s account manager .......................................... 58
8.2 Appendix B – Interviews with industry professionals ................................................... 59
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1 Introduction This section introduces the research area covered by the thesis. The section includes the
background, research questions, purpose and objective, delimitations and concludes with a
report disposition.
1.1 Background With the digital transformation that has undergone in the last few decades, almost all
industries have had to rethink their way of doing business in one way or another. Companies
who have not accepted the shift have suffered from consequences, and the ones who were
quick to revamp their business gained an advantage through being the first mover. One
industry that has changed immensely is the media industry with, for example, the emergence
and rapid growth of social media.
Social media – an ecosystem open to everyone, which mixes personal and professional
information, leaves a natural opening for businesses to gain a new channel of communication
with its customers. Through this, social media has become an integral part of many
businesses, and more companies are adopting it in their overall business strategy. As a two-
sided network, hosting both consumers and businesses, a plethora of opportunities have
emerged. Companies have a much easier time finding consumers who share interests, creating
direct value for both parties, and through this can use the medium for marketing and other
aspects (Shoor, 2016).
With this digital transformation, the advertising landscape has seen a rapid growth of digital
advertising in comparison to traditional advertising. In 2016, 45.1% of all Swedish advertising
budgets was used on digital channels, with the largest growth being search engine advertising,
social media and web-based TV (Thor, 2017). One of the biggest actors in this landscape is
Facebook, which hosts the possibility for both organic and paid marketing.
However, many companies are rushing into the social media landscape without putting much
thought into why they are doing it, or what they aim to get out of it. Companies see their
competitors successfully execute a social media strategy, and try to replicate it – often facing
difficulties figuring out what the goals of their social media presence should be, and how to
achieve the goals they have with their efforts (Eurostat, 2016; Davidson, 2014).
Another issue that companies are facing regarding investing in a social media strategy is
figuring out which advantages are gained through it in comparison to more traditional media.
With limited information about the customer experience and a difficulty in evaluating social
media efforts, it is increasingly difficult for companies to balance their marketing budget
between the available alternatives.
This master’s thesis in collaboration with Marvelous, a digital advertising agency with
expertise on social media, will investigate the different phases of developing a social media
strategy and maintaining it. While doing so, it will analyze which benefits are gained by
incorporating social media into an overall marketing strategy. Through this, Marvelous will
also have a better case to present to businesses on why they should invest in social media, and
how they should go about doing so.
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1.1.1 About Marvelous This master’s thesis has been carried out at the Nordic digital advertising agency Marvelous,
which has offices in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. Founded back in 2011, the
company has evolved to serve businesses in a multitude of ways, primarily focusing on
branding and marketing. Marvelous primarily helps businesses with digital solutions,
specializing in developing strategies for improving their digital presence. In the Stockholm
office, where this thesis was conducted, Marvelous consists of approximately 10 employees.
1.2 Research questions Marketing strategies have existed for a long time – but companies are having a challenging
time understanding how to incorporate social media into their overall strategy and create
social media strategies. Not understanding the landscape and rushing into it leads to questions
regarding what the advantages are, and how these social media strategies should be thought
out and developed.
Main research question Which aspects need to be considered when developing and maintaining a social
media strategy for marketing purposes?
Additional research questions Which advantages are gained by B2C companies investing in a social media strategy
for marketing purposes?
Which advantages are native to social media marketing which do not exist in more
traditional marketing?
1.3 Purpose and objectives The primary goal of this research is investigating how social media strategies are developed
and then maintained through time and therein also analyze the benefits achieved in doing so.
As mentioned, the research will supply Marvelous with a greater case to present to their
clients as to why they should invest in social media. The purpose is also to increase the
understanding of how social media marketing strategies are created, help companies achieve
their overall business goals, and what the impacts are for the companies who have invested in
a social media strategy. This thesis aims to clarify in which way efforts put into a company’s
social media strategy provides advantages which might not directly be financial, but also add
other sources of business value.
1.4 Delimitations This master’s thesis will focus on the social media landscape which is used for marketing
purposes, with a primary focus on Facebook as the channel. The execution of the research will
be done on the Swedish market using a Swedish client for the study (which, however, is partly
operated from the Danish Marvelous office), as well as interviewing Swedish professionals.
The social media platform investigated in the research will be Facebook, as it is the primarily
used platform for marketing purposes on the Swedish market. The research will however
highlight the strategy creation aspect for social media as a whole, and not just strategies
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involving Facebook. Apart from the above, the thesis will be limited to B2C companies, and
will exclude B2B companies.
1.5 Report disposition This report starts off by presenting a theoretical foundation based on an extensive literature
review, which acts to provide an overarching introduction to the area. The theoretical section
begins by introducing and defining social media, followed by presenting the usage of it in
Sweden both for the public and for businesses. The section continues to present social media
strategies and necessary considerations when creating a strategy. Lastly, the theory section
describes social media marketing and aspects which it encompasses, such as branding, user-
generated content, word-of-mouth and wraps up with an explanation of social media
marketing evaluation.
Following the theory section, the methodology used for the research will be presented in
detail. This section describes the three methodologies used, namely a literature study, a case
study and qualitative interviews with industry professionals.
The report then continues with the results of the thesis, first introducing the results from the
case study in the form of interviews and data extracted from the Facebook account of a
Marvelous client who has invested in a social media strategy through them. Following the
case study, the results from six interviews are also presented.
Finally, the report wraps up with a discussion, analysis and conclusion. In the discussion and
analysis, a six-step social media strategy life cycle is presented which combines previous
research with the results of this thesis. The discussion also presents some methodology
criticism as to what could have been done differently. The conclusion provides answers to the
research questions this thesis is based around and provides recommendations to what areas
should be researched further.
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2 Theory This section will begin by presenting an excerpt of the academia covering the broad definition
of social media and the usage of social media for the public as well as for enterprises. It will
then continue by discussing the concepts of social media strategies and social media
marketing within relevant areas.
2.1 Social Media Social media, rooted in the distribution of Internet technologies, has in the last decade
attracted an immense amount of attention due to its emergence and growth. It is widely
accepted that the very first social media platform, SixDegrees.com launched in 1997, allowed
users to create profiles, list friends and later on to browse friend lists (Boyd & Ellison, 2007).
This functionality existed beforehand, but was not incorporated into one single site before
then. As Internet technologies evolved, and the growth of the Internet continued, social media
continued catching traction in the early 00’s with a large amount of social medias, such as
MySpace, LinkedIn and Last.FM, releasing in 2003 (Boyd & Ellison, 2007).
The emergence and rapid growth of social media has enabled a platform for consumers to
communicate with each other as well as directly with companies. This shift gives consumers
an opportunity to express themselves and hence have more control (Mangold & Faulds,
2009). The platform enables consumers through giving them an opportunity to communicate
with thousands of other consumers in similar situations. The result is a shift for companies as
they are no longer the sole facilitator of brand communication (Bruhn et al., 2012). According
to Kietzmann et al. (2011), everything indicates that we are in the midst of an entirely new
communication landscape. In this communication landscape, social media is increasingly
replacing traditional media (Bruhn et al., 2012).
2.1.1 Social media definition Social media encompasses many different platforms, with new platforms appearing
frequently. These platforms primarily come in the form of web-based platforms or mobile
applications. To gain a deeper understanding of what the social media spectrum includes it is
vital to try to define the concept. Kaplan & Haenlein (2010) have a well-renowned definition
of social media often used in academic purposes, which reads:
“Social Media is 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.”
This definition encompasses a broad range of platforms which encourages users to
communicate, create content, share content and therein create an open landscape driven by the
users (Kietzmann et al., 2011). Another definition, as defined by Boyd & Ellison (2008) also
highlights that social networks requires users to be able to:
1) Construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system.
2) Articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection
3) View and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the
system.
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The above definitions show that social media is a broad and complex system, which exists in
many different forms. To illustrate the complex ecosystem of social networks, Brian Solis
developed the Conversation Prism in 2008, which has later been expanded over the years. The
Conversation Prism, shown in Figure 1, is an illustration of the social media landscape,
categorizing different sites depending on their nature. (Solis & JESS3, 2017)
Figure 1: The Conversation prism developed by Brian Solis & JESS3 (2017)
As can be derived from the conversation prism, the spectrum of different social media
platforms is large and complex. This thesis will primarily focus on Facebook, found at the top
of the prism under “Social Networks”, as it is the most common social media platform in
Sweden, both in terms of usability for companies, but also in terms of user basis.
2.2 Social media usage To gain an insight in the sheer volume of active social media users, this section will cover the
number of social media users in Sweden both for individuals as well as for enterprises. Note
that the figures presented regarding social media users in Sweden refer to a wide range of
different social media sites, and is not limited to Facebook.
2.2.1 The general public’s social media usage According to Statista’s Market Analysis of Sweden’s social media penetration forecast
between 2014 and 2021, the percentage of Swedish residents who used at least one social
media site monthly in 2014 was 56.7%, which is expected to increase to 59.28% in 2021
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(Statista, 2016). In 2017, the penetration is at 58.14% – which translates to roughly 6 million
active social media users in Sweden. Figure 2 shows Statista’s expected forecast of social
network user penetration up until 2021.
Figure 2: Forecast of social networks user penetration in Sweden. Source: (Statista, 2016)
Another analysis of the social media landscape in Sweden conducted by IIS (Internetstiftelsen
i Sverige) during the end of 2016 shows the following usage distribution of all Swedish
Internet users between the 5 largest social media sites, presented in Table 1.
Social media site: Percentage of Internet users who use the
site:
Facebook 71%
Instagram 44%
LinkedIn 26%
Snapchat 25%
Twitter 18% Table 1: User distribution between social media sites. Source: (Davidsson et al., 2016)
One factor behind the growth of social media can be contributed to their nature of user-
generated media with information initiated, circulated and used by consumers. The nature of
the creation of the content is with intent of spreading information regarding subjects such as
brands, services and products – which is vital information in a consumerism focused society
(Tang et al., 2012).
2.2.2 Social media usage for businesses A similar increase of use of social media that is seen for individuals can also be seen for
enterprises. Eurostat, associated with the European Union, extracted data during the beginning
of 2016 on how enterprises are adapting different social media sites into their business
strategy. The published report shows that in Sweden, at least 51% of enterprises used a
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minimum of one social media site during 2015. This is a substantial increase since 2013,
where only 42% of Swedish enterprises had adopted the strategy (Eurostat, 2016).
The article reads:
“They have integrated social media into the way they run their business, organised forms of
internal communication apart from the management chain and, most importantly,
communicated and interacted with customers using the new applications. From that point of
view it has been possible for customers to influence business decisions and assist companies
in designing and marketing their products.”
Eurostat continue this reasoning and highlight that 79% of these enterprises use social media
for image building and marketing, 52% report using social media as a new way to obtain
customer opinions and reviews. This line of reasoning is often agreed upon, Dimitriadis &
Tsimonis (2014) mean that companies are adopting social media for marketing and branding
purposes due to the fact that it nets an opportunity to monitor, listen and interact with
consumers. They also state that the adoption of social media is self-fulfilling in that many
businesses start their social media efforts in response to their competitor’s efforts to do so.
However, it would seem that many businesses rush into social media without a tangible plan,
and without really knowing how to benefit the most from the different platforms (Davidson,
2014). Davidson (2014) states that many companies treat the social platforms as a
broadcasting studio rather than a dialogue and interaction, which the customers do not
appreciate. This further highlights that it is essential for businesses to have a social media
strategy before entering the arena.
2.3 Social media strategy A social media strategy is a way to strategically set up goals for how companies efforts on
social media platforms connect with the overall business plans and goals. A social media
strategy almost exclusively involves using social media as a platform for marketing, but can
also involve aspects such as customer service and other communicational aspects. One
definition as proposed by Keegan & Rowley (2017) of what a social media strategy is
supposed to accomplish reads:
“The strategy would link the business objectives through their communication and marketing
objectives, to create social [media marketing] objectives.”
With the evolvement of social media, and how it touches nearly every aspect of our personal
and business lives, it is imperative for businesses to add social media into their overall
business strategy and linking it to the business objectives (Hanna et al., 2011). The result of a
well-executed social media strategy allows companies with a way to connect and engage
directly with consumers in an entirely new fashion (Keegan & Rowley, 2017). A well-
executed strategy should engage their audience and focus on building interactions with the
consumers (Davidson, 2014), and use the engagement to make the company a “friend” in a
social context and through this build trust, commitment and loyalty (Kilgour et al., 2015).
Another aspect businesses need to consider when developing their social media strategy is
that the brand must have its fundamentals in order, and that it can deliver upon all brand
promises. This is due to consumers being likely to share brand-related posts on social media if
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they are very positive, or if they have negative connotations with the brand – which might
prove be detrimental (Barwise & Meehan, 2010).
It is also vital to note that social media strategies cannot be deployed only once, but need
constant iteration depending on how the consumers react to them (Alves et al., 2016).
2.3.1 Considerations necessary when creating a social
media strategy
2.3.1.1 Understanding the social media ecosystem to create a
strategy Due to the complexity of the social media ecosystem, as seen in chapter 2.1.1, it is crucial for
businesses to understand which different social medias are out there and how the users
perceive and use them. In light of this, Kietzmann et al. (2011) pointed out that firms must
develop clear strategies which correlate with the functionalities of different social media sites,
and align them with the goals of the businesses. To address the differences in the ecosystem,
Kietzmann et al. (2011) developed a model consisting of seven building blocks, which they
refer to as the honeycomb of social media. The seven blocks are necessary to understand to
scan the social media environment and build the social media strategy in accordance to it. The
honeycomb can be seen in Figure 3.
Figure 3: The honeycomb of social media. Source: (Kietzmann et al., 2011)
Kietzmann et al. (2011) further build onto the model by presenting a guideline for developing
strategies regarding social media activities. This guideline is referred to as the four C’s, which
are:
Cognize – Start by recognizing the current social media landscape to understand
functionality and engagement implications. During this phase, a company should also
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look at their competitors to get a deeper understanding of how to stand out and make
an impact on the consumers.
Congruity – Continue by developing strategies in accordance to the landscape
previously cognized. Depending on what the business strives for, the strategy needs to
be planned accordingly.
Curate – The business must itself act as a curator of social media interactions and
content. To do this, analyzing how and when to interact over social media is vital. This
needs to be done in unison throughout the company, which might require policies for
the employees responsible for the social media.
Chase – Finally, businesses need to constantly chase information about social media.
This includes analyzing their own social media activities, but also the changing social
media environment.
2.3.1.2 A framework for developing a social media strategy Felix et al. (2017) present a framework for developing social media marketing (SMM)
strategies in which they define different spectrums that companies have to establish positions
upon. First, the social media marketing scope defines if the business uses social media
defensively, meaning that the usage is primarily for pushing information to consumers in the
form of a one-way communication channel, or if the business uses SMM exploratively,
entailing primarily relationship building and collaboration in the form of, for example,
communities. The second spectrum is called social media marketing culture, where one end is
called conservatism (encapsulated, traditional, mass-advertising approach to SMM) and the
other is called modernism (permeable, open and flexible SMM). The third spectrum, social
media marketing structure, relates to how organizations handle SMM internally – either
through a hierarchical approach where a few select people handle all SMM, or through
networks where many, if not all, employees handle the SMM for the firm. Finally, the fourth
spectrum is called social media marketing governance and is in regard to how companies
establishes policies which regulates what employees are allowed to say on social media
platforms. On one end of this spectrum is anarchy, where there are no internal policies
regarding SMM for employees, and on the other end is autocracy which has precise
regulations and policies of who may interact on social media platforms in the face of the
company. Naturally companies end up somewhere in the middle of the above-mentioned
spectrums.
2.4 Social media marketing With the immense rise of social media, there is a clear shift in how marketers use the medium
in comparison the more traditional media. SMM is a natural reaction to how social media is
replacing traditional media (Bruhn et al., 2012), which is defined as a process empowering
individuals to promote their websites, products or services through online social channels and
by doing so tapping into and communicating with a much larger community than traditional
advertising channels could (Weinberg, 2009). Before businesses begin their SMM the need to
develop a strategy, as described in chapter 2.3, is essential.
The primary objective of SMM includes stimulating sales, raising brand awareness,
improving brand image, generating traffic to other sources such as primary website, reduce
marketing cost and creating user interactions by stimulating users to engage with the content.
(Felix et al., 2017)
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One aspect that is unique and native to SMM in comparison to traditional marketing is that it
most often centers around a two-way conversation and exchange, rather than a strict business
to consumer focus (Bacile et al., 2014). Social media has enabled users to become active
creators of the content and acts as a platform where the users communicate with each other
and in so exchange information. But not only has SMM made it possible for consumers to
influence brands and be co-creators of content – it has created a willingness amongst
consumers to actively be a part of product development and feedback (Parise & Guinan,
2008). With this, the role of marketing on social media platforms is not strictly to drive sales,
but can also be adopted to continually work on the value proposition and product offering a
company has.
Previous research has highlighted how various aspects of SMM are essential to understand to
create a fully functional and strategic approach. Consumer-brand relations (Bruhn et al., 2012;
Ahmad et al., 2016; Dimitriadis & Tsimonis, 2014), content marketing (Ahmad et al., 2016),
word of mouth marketing (Chang et al., 2015) and user-generated content (Barger et al.,
2016) need to be examined before businesses start engaging with SMM. Further on, the
efforts put into SMM need to be evaluated in order to analyze how to continually optimize
these efforts and learn from previous ones (Keegan & Rowley, 2017).
2.4.1 Consumer-brand relations Conventionally, the view of how brands are created and preserved has been that they are firm-
owned under control of the company brand managers (Keller, 1993), created by, for example,
marketing efforts focusing on brand stories. These marketing efforts were created to be
interpreted the same by all consumers, conveying a narrative with an aim to establishing and
strengthening relations with consumers. If some consumers did not agree with these efforts,
their voices were weak and could quite easily be ignored by these brand managers. However,
with the rise of social media enabled by the Internet, brand managers have lost the control
they previously had, and the consumer voices disagreeing with the brand narrative now have a
forum in which they can be heard (Kuksov et al., 2013).
Through social media, consumer-brand relations are now a two-way exchange. Holt (2016)
states that the biggest change of branding brought by social media is the rise of a crowd
culture. Fournier & Avery (2011) go as far as saying that social media has turned branding
into open-sourced, defined as.
“Open source branding implicates participatory, collaborative, and socially-linked behaviors
whereby consumers serve as creators and disseminators of branded content. Social media
technologies such as blogging, video sharing, social bookmarking, social networking, and
community platforms enable open source branding by empowering consumers to create their
own personalized experiences and by providing venues via which they can easily share
content with like-minded friends.” (Fournier & Avery, 2011)
As such, companies need to adopt their branding strategies in relation to the open-source,
crowd culture which is prominent today. Brand management has transformed into using firm-
controlled branding and adapting it to the consumer-controlled branding which social media
enables. Hence, there is a need for companies to immerse themselves in a mix of company-
based branding and user-generated branding, defined as “…the strategic and operative
11
management of brand related user generated content (UGC) to achieve brand goals”
(Burmann & Arnhold, 2009).
This includes responding to negative consumer-controlled branding by monitoring social
media space and quickly responding to any damaging content (Gensler et al., 2013). More
importantly, companies should stimulate and promote the positive consumer-generated
branding through user-generated content, see chapter 2.4.2. Previous research indicates that
SMM brand activities are vital elements to build positive brand attitudes (Yazdanparast et al.,
2016).
Moreover, since consumers are gaining an increasing role in brand perception they also
interpret information from companies and consumers differently. Due to this change in how
consumers interpret information depending on the source, a single customer is worth far more
than what the customer originally spends if he or she passes positive information about the
brand through social media (Bruhn et al., 2012). As can be gathered from the Figure 4 below,
social media has changed the way consumers interact with brand.
Figure 4: What’s Next In Media: Space defined by Media Owner. Source: (Perkin, 2008)
2.4.2 User-generated content Social media, which in accordance to the definition proposed by Kaplan & Haenlein (2010) is
a primary system for user-generated content. User-generated content is sources of online
information which is created, initiated, circulated and used by consumers with an intent on
educating or informing others about, for example, products, brands or services (Tang et al.,
2012). As such, it is important for companies to develop their SMM efforts with knowledge
that consumers might reciprocate content – which may either detrimentally hurt the brand or
assist in strengthening it. Previous research shows that the relative aspect of user-generated
content has a greater impact on firms profits rather than firm-generated content, and that ideal
social media strategies have to account for user-generated content (Goh et al., 2013).
Facebook in particular offers opportunities for marketers to collaborate with consumers and
thus create positive sentiment and heightened visibility of the brand (Smith et al., 2012).
Muntinga et al. (2011) propose a behavior construct called COBRA, short for Consumer
Online Brand-Related Activity, which distinguishes 3 levels of consumer engagement,
12
namely consuming, contributing and creating. Consuming is, for example, viewing videos,
reading posts or reading product reviews. Contributing refers to engaging with brands through
rating products, joining conversations or commenting on brand-related posts. Creating is the
step where the consumer actively uploads brand-related content, such as videos or images.
Creating also refers to when consumers themselves start writing product reviews or other
brand-related content.
Muntinga et al. (2011) conclude that the main motives for engaging in these three different
levels of engagement differs:
Consuming – Motivated by a need for information, entertainment and remuneration.
Contributing – Motivated by personal identity, integration, social interaction and
entertainment.
Creating – This level of engagement is driven by the same four factors as contributing,
meaning personal identity, integration, social interaction and entertainment.
With the above in mind, brand managers have an opportunity to create their strategies while
anticipating and stimulating consumers to actively be part of a co-creation process. An
example could be that the marketers create campaigns which enable the consumers to create
brand stories showing of their personal identity while also enjoying themselves (Muntinga et
al., 2011).
Barger et al. (2016) continue upon this line of thought by proposing five antecedents to
consumer engagement, which are: brand factors product factors, consumer factors, content
factors and social media factors. By knowing these five factors and analyzing how to position
the content and product in line with the brand, the consumers and the social media landscape
grants businesses an opportunity to have a positive engagement with the content. The
engagement with the content, in turn, grants five different consequences: brand effects,
product effects, consumer effects, content effects and market effects. The content can either
strengthen or weaken the brand, grant positive or negative feedback on the product, persuade
consumers to become advocates for the content and in doing so granting a further positive
effect on the marketing efforts, help spread the content further through consumers re-sharing
or creating similar content as well as significantly influence the market. (Barger et al., 2016)
They continue this line of reasoning by presenting a model for the process and correlation
between consumer engagement and firm engagement on social media. As described in chapter
2.4.1, the relation between consumer and firm requires that the brand listens to, responds to
and adapts to how consumers generate content regarding a brand, and use this content
themselves in order to strengthen the brand image and generate more opportunities (Barger et
al., 2016). Singh and Sonnenburg (2012) advocates that it is vital for firms to actively be part
of all stages in a communication process from delivery, to listening for a response, to using
that response. As such, marketers need to change their mindset to that branding needs to
involve the audience in a co-creational process. Figure 5 on the next page describes the
process from when the brand posts content to the iterative process of consumer engagement
and firm responding.
13
Figure 5: Consumer and firm engagement on social media. Source: (Barger et al., 2016)
2.4.3 Word of mouth marketing enabled by social
media Another part of marketing which is enhanced my SMM is that of word-of-mouth (WOM),
especially electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) – defined as “any positive or negative
statement made by potential, actual, or former customers about a product or company, which
is made available to a multitude of people and institutions via the Internet” (Hennig-Thurau
et al., 2004).
All the way back in 1957, marketers came to the realization that WOM was crucial due to
how recipients of marketing campaigns also consult others before finalizing purchases
(Brooks Jr., 1957). Back then, reviewers were important, but people valued the opinions of
their nearby social circle even more. However, with the rise of the Internet and digital
marketing, individuals have begun exploring the advice of others outside their immediate
social circle (De Bruyn & Lilien, 2008), which has become substantially easier through social
media. The primary reason for why consumers choose to seek advice of people rather than
advertising or editorial recommendations is due to an increase of credibility (Godes &
Mayzlin, 2004).
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SMM enables companies to launch massive campaigns which end up in an otherwise personal
feed on social media platforms. Previous research has established different variables which
are evaluated by consumers before engaging in eWOM over social media sites:
Tie strength – The closer the relationship between the actors in a WOM-situation are,
the likelier the recommendation will be engaged with.
Homophily – refers to the degree to which the interacting individuals share attributes
such as age, gender or beliefs. Interestingly, both sides of the spectrum of positive and
negative homophily evoke engagement between the parties.
Trust – Defined as “[…] a willingness to rely on an exchange partner in whom one
has confidence” (Moorman et al., 1993). Trust relates to how the partners believe to
have the best intention at heart.
Interpersonal influence – a social factor which regards to personality traits. This is
split into normative and informational influences. Normative influences refer to the
tendency of conforming to other expectations whereas informational influences refer
to the tendency to accept information from various sources.
(Chu & Kim, 2011; Kucukemiroglu & Kara, 2015; De Bruyn & Lilien, 2008)
If companies manage to produce a social media strategy that promotes the consumers,
through building up a relationship with them, to actively share and engage by discussing
the product and become advocates for it – the benefits are colossal.
Dave Evans (2010) talks about how social media has enhanced the social feedback cycle,
seen in Figure 6, as social media has enabled a global audience to react to marketer-
generated content. The model presented is key, as it forms the basis of social businesses –
it represents how social technologies has enabled users to communicate on a global scale,
including business to consumer, consumer to business but also consumer to consumer.
The result is that information which might previously have been contained within a small
portion of people is now broadly exposed – this information can either have negative
consequences or be beneficial for the companies (Evans, 2010).
Figure 6: Social feedback cycle. Source: (Evans, 2010)
2.4.4 Social media marketing evaluation Another aspect which often gets overlooked when businesses start their social media efforts is
how to actively evaluate the efforts and how to optimize the return on investment (ROI).
Businesses need to be able to get a better general understanding of how the efforts contribute
15
to the overall marketing objectives and business goals (McCann & Barlow, 2015; Kumar &
Mirchandani, 2012). It is important to understand when trying to measure ROI that the
financial returns should not be the entire focus. Social media offers benefits associated with
intangible metrics, such as conversation and participation, granting long-term relations and
brand engagement.
Keegan & Rowley (2017) propose a six-step iterative process for how to go about setting up
evaluation goals for marketing efforts. These steps are:
The process starts by setting up evaluation objectives, linking the SMM with other
marketing goals and business objectives. Examples of objectives to accomplish
through SMM could be:
o Increase sales.
o Improve brand awareness.
o Increase traffic to website.
o Relationship building.
After the general evaluation objectives are set, it is crucial to identify which key
performance indicators (KPIs) that can be used.
Continue by identifying which metrics that can be gathered to support the evaluation.
These metrics might either be native to the social media platforms or need to be
combined with metrics from other sources.
Once the above has been decided, the SMM efforts can be started. The data collection
and analysis should be done throughout the lifetime of a SMM effort, as well as
afterwards.
Compile the data into a report, easily presentable in an accessible and understandable
format.
Finally, present the reports to marketing management in order to fully evaluate the
effort, and how to proceed going forward as well as gain business insights into how
future iterations need to be tweaked.
(Keegan & Rowley, 2017; McCann & Barlow, 2015)
One of the keys to this process is that it must be iterative. Especially since SMM still has
difficulties in how to properly evaluate the efforts, companies constantly need to strive to
learn how to better optimize the evaluation process and how to go about their SMM to create
a more sustainable presence on social media which may lead to economical sustainability for
the companies.
The above line of reasoning is often agreed upon by other researchers. For example, in an
article focusing on small and medium sized enterprises – McCann & Barlow (2015) propose a
similar approach to how to evaluate SMM efforts. The authors create a three-step iterative
process with the planning stage, implementation stage and evaluation stage. Like Keegan &
Rowley’s (2017) line of reasoning, the planning stage is made up from formulating goals,
objectives and metrics. The implementation stage is made up from implementing the
appropriate SMM tools as well as constantly analyzing and measuring the effort. Finally, the
evaluation stage should evaluate both long- and short-term benefits as well as the ROI.
16
3 Methodology This section will cover the methodology used for the thesis, as well as an explanation why this
methodology was chosen to answer the research questions at hand.
3.1 Literature study The topics of social media, marketing and strategies were initially researched as a foundation
for the rest of the methodology and execution of the research. This study also presents key
concepts addressed throughout the thesis.
3.1.1 Purpose of method The literature study focused on finding relevant research conducted on the subject with the
purpose of gaining a general understanding of the area, an overview of the existing research
as well as provide a solid foundation to form the remaining methodology upon. The primary
keywords used for the literature search can be found in Table 2.
Branding Consumer
relations
Marketing
trends
Social media
strategy
Business-to-
consumer
marketing
Marketing Social media Strategy
application
B2C Marketing
framework
Social media
advantage
User generated
content
Competitive
advantage
Marketing
strategy
Strategy
creation
Word of mouth
Table 2: Search terms used in literature study
The literature study initially used a general search approach, primarily using the keywords
social media marketing and social media strategy, and was continually narrowed down further
as credible and relevant research papers were identified. The literature search used an iterative
process combining the above-mentioned keywords using “and”/”or”.
The searches were made primarily using four databases, Google Scholar, Emerald Insight,
KTHB Primo and the ordinary Google engine. Using the relevant articles found from these
sources, the references used in those were also examined to gain insight into the most
prevalent articles in the area.
3.2 Case study of Marvelous To gain an insight into how industry professionals approach the topic, and to obtain a
practical understanding of the area, a case study of the digital agency Marvelous was
conducted.
17
3.2.1 Interview with Marvelous’ head of social in
Denmark First, an unstructured interview was held with David Ledstrup, head of social for Marvelous
in Denmark, based on a recommendation from the Swedish office. An unstructured interview
was chosen to get information on how he viewed social media strategies and their
development without imposing any direct questions to guide his answers along the line of the
thesis.
The interview had the starting point of discussing social media strategies and his approach to
the subject at hand. During this interview, David sent a PowerPoint-presentation with his own
illustrations of strategies – which are presented in chapter 4.1.1 and is referred to as “David’s
PowerPoint”. The interview was a best-in-class interview of a renowned social media expert
to gain a deeper understanding of his views on the overarching questions at hand which was
then used as a point to continue the research from. After finishing the interview, it was
transcribed for easier analysis.
3.2.1 Finding a relevant client The second aspect of the case study was finding one of Marvelous’ clients suitable for the
research. The criteria were that they had to be a client of Marvelous for at least 6 months,
gotten their social media strategy developed with help from Marvelous and that a large focus
of the strategy was on Facebook.
The decided partner was a large retail company conducting business in several European
countries, including Sweden. The company has asked not to be mentioned by name in this
thesis – therefore, the company at hand will be referred to as “the client” or “Marvelous’
client” throughout the remainder of this thesis. Furthermore, the data extracted from the
client’s Facebook page has been multiplied by a coefficient to avoid the possibility to track it
back to their page – the following data has had a coefficient in the range of 1.0-2.0 multiplied
to it: page likes, page reach, post reach (total, organic and paid), lifetime engaged consumers,
reactions, comments, shares, total money spent and link clicks. Aside from this, the exact
contents of the social media strategy as presented in chapter 4.1.2 will not be revealed –
instead, the general structure of it and the content will be described to provide valuable insight
in how a finished social media strategy looks in practice.
3.2.2 Information retrieval about the client Once the partner had been decided upon, a semi-structured interview (Fontana & Frey, 1994)
was held with the person who at the time was the account manager of the client. The goal of
this semi-structured interview was to have a discussion regarding questions about the strategy
creation, goals of the strategy as well as Facebook’s position in comparison to other brand
communication and evaluation. The questions can be found in Appendix A. This interview
was later transcribed for easier analysis.
After the interview, the social media strategy of the client was sent to me by email and an
excel file with the money spent on some of the posts. Do note that the excel file contained the
spend based on a Danish budget, as the client is partly operated from there – as such, the
numbers presented in the results will be using DKK rather than SEK. I was also given access
to the client’s Facebook account.
18
3.2.3 Data analysis of the client After gaining insight of how the client is operated, data was extracted from the Facebook page
using the Insight-tool. In total, the data was extracted from a 5-month period, namely
November 1st 2016 to March 31st 2017. The retail company has individual Facebook pages for
each market, and the data analyzed in this thesis was solely from the Swedish Facebook page.
The data which was analyzed for the sake of this thesis was:
On a page level, the data extracted can be found in Table 3.
Metric. Description. Formula.
Page likes. The number of people who have pressed
“Like” on the client’s Facebook page.
-
Weekly page reach. The unique number of people who have seen
content relating to the page, for example by
visiting the page or seeing a post show up in
their newsfeed. The number presented is the
sum of people over a seven-day period.
-
Table 3: Page data extracted from the client’s Facebook account
On a post level, the data which was extracted and analyzed can be found in Table 4.
Metric. Description. Formula.
Post reach. The unique number of people who
have seen a specific post. Both
organic and paid reach was extracted
and analyzed.
-
Post engaged users. The unique number of people who
have interacted with a specific post.
Interactions include all clicks and
stories which have been created
(reactions, comments, shares for
example).
-
Reactions,
comments and
shares.
Number of people who have either
reacted to, commented on, or shared
a specific post.
(Reactions + Comments +
Shares)
Total engagement
rate.
The percentage of the people who
have seen the post that have engaged
with it.
(Post engaged users / Post
reach)
Engagement rate of
reactions, comments
and shares.
The percentage of the people who
have seen the post that either reacted
to, commented on or shared it.
((Reactions + Comments +
Shares) / Post reach)
Engagement rate of
link clicks.
The percentage of the people who
have seen the post that clicked a link
in the post. Note that a lot of posts
did not have a link attached to them.
((Total link clicks) / Post
reach)
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Engagement rate of
other engagements.
The percentage of the people who
engaged with the post in a form
other than clicking a link, reacting,
commenting or sharing it.
((Total engagement –
(Reactions + Comments +
Shares) – Link Clicks) /
Post reach)
CPM (Cost per one
thousand
impressions).
The cost for the client to have their
post seen 1000 times (may not be
unique people seeing it).
(Money invested in the
post / ((Post reach *
Frequency)/1000))
Table 4: Post data extracted and analyzed from the client’s Facebook page.
The primary reason for the data section of the thesis is to grant the readers an overview of
which numbers can be seen from a company which has invested in a social media strategy –
however, an analysis for correlations could not be performed due to lacking the final amount
of money spent on some of the posts. Despite this, the data still fulfils a crucial part by
displaying the reach which can be achieved with a strategy and provides information on the
cost of doing social media marketing. It also proves valuable as it shows how engaged the
users are with posts during the period, and how the client balances the reach between paid and
organic.
The posts were categorized in one of 4 ways: Interaction, DIY, Feel-good and Product posts,
which is an internal categorization for the client, and is presented further in chapter 4.1.2.2.
3.3 Interviews with industry professionals To get a less nuanced view of the questions at hand, interviews were held alongside the case
study. These interviews served to get a wider range of opinions on the subject, and not base
the entire thesis on a specific case.
3.3.1 Interview questions In total, six interviews were held using a semi-structured interview approach (Fontana & Frey,
1994). The reason for choosing a semi-structured interview was to be able to guide the
discussion along the lines of the research questions, while still being able to insert probes
during the interviews. Examples of probes was asking the interviewees to clarify, expand their
reasoning or provide an example. Through this, a larger understanding of the questions was
achievable. The structure of the interviews was mainly based on five areas, which were:
1. Opening questions regarding the person, such as background, current position and
past experiences.
2. Reasons for why companies invest in a social media strategy, both in the form of
reasons for choosing to do so and the goals that the strategies normally have.
3. Strategy creation process, the steps which are taken when developing a strategy. This
area also contained questions regarding common mistakes and what analyses that are
conducted in the process.
4. Advantages of social media in comparison to traditional media with questions
regarding the direct advantages and differences between social media marketing and
traditional marketing.
20
5. Measurement evaluation and strategy adjustments. How to set up measurement
frameworks, important KPIs and how the results of these evaluations adapt the
strategy.
The interview questions can be found in Appendix B.
3.4.2 Interviewee selection In total, 15 potential interviewees were scouted on LinkedIn by searching for people located
in Stockholm who had the work title “Social media strategist” or “Social media manager”.
These potential interviewees were either contacted using LinkedIn’s InMail or by email if
their work email addresses could easily be found by typing their name and company into a
search engine. In total, eight of these 15 replied to the enquiries, from which six accepted
meeting for an interview. Table 5 shows the interviewees who were interviewed during this
research:
Interviewee
number.
Current position. Current company. Years of
experience working
with social media.
1 Social media specialist and
vicarious head of marketing.
Digital bureau. Studied 1.5 years.
Worked 2 years +.
2 Social media manager. Hotel. 5 Years. Worked
with large B2C
brands at digital
bureaus previously.
3 Nordic social media
strategist.
Global entertainment
company.
4-5 years.
4 Social media strategist. Freelancing with
small and large
clients.
3 years.
5 Digital and social media
specialist.
Digital bureau. 5 years.
6 Digital strategist, recently
promoted from social media
strategist.
Digital bureau. 4 years.
Table 5: Interview participants, with their interviewee number, current position, current company and experience working
with social media.
3.4.3 Interview process and analysis All six of the interviews were conducted in person and recorded to ensure that the full
attention of both me and the interviewee was on the subject at hand. One noteworthy point is
that due to the semi-structured nature of the interviews, the questions were not always asked
in the exact same order depending on what side-steps the interviews took – but all questions
had been asked at the end of each interview.
The interviews ranged from 28 minutes to 45-minutes long, and were transcribed directly
after they were conducted for an easier analysis. These transcriptions were then analyzed by
21
scanning them for keywords and trends. Following the initial analysis, the interviews were
methodically analyzed using a sentence concentration method, described by Kvale (Kvale &
Brinkmann, 2014) as extracting the essentials of the material and shortening down the
formulations, while also categorizing the material. This method for analyzing the interviews
helped by vastly shortening down the responses to the questions while maintaining the
quality. The answers may either have been in direct response to the specific questions or be a
response in another part of the interview.
3.5 Choice of methodology The choice of having these three different methodologies was based upon each respective part
playing a key role, and the combination of the three would grant the best opportunities to
answer the research questions.
The literature section acts to establish a solid foundation by analyzing what others have
accomplished in the field and not having to answer questions which already have been
answered. The literature section also helps in shaping the rest of the methodologies by
examining how others have tackled similar problems.
The case study serves as a tangible real-life scenario of how people working with the subject
see the questions based on everyday actions with their respective clients. However, the
interviews were added as an extension to this to get a less nuanced answer to the questions at
hand. One of the main goals of this research is to have a broad answer to the research
questions, and not just be able to answer how one specific company in the Nordic area would
answer them.
22
4 Results This section will cover the results from two of the methodologies used. The section will begin
by presenting the results from the case study conducted on Marvelous and continue by
presenting the results from the six interviews with social media industry professionals.
4.1 Case study of Marvelous
4.1.1 Introductory interview with David Ledstrup As described in the methodology section, an interview with David Ledstrup, head of social for
Marvelous in Denmark was initially held.
4.1.1.1 What is a social media strategy David starts off by saying that a social media strategy is an incorporation of social media into
a more classic market strategy, and that the two have quite a bit of an overlap. The difference,
and separator, is that social media strategies takes upon a more holistic approach to all
different social media channels through analyzing the company’s social media presence and
the audience’s social media presence. Moreover, David notes that a strategy should answer
why a company wants to be there, and lay out the goals for the company’s presence.
On one of David’s PowerPoint slides
which he shows regarding social media
strategies – he presents Figure 7 as seen to
the left. In this visualization, the strategy is
the link which connects four aspects:
namely organization, measurement,
objective & audience and the tactics which
are incorporated to carry out the strategy.
Moreover, he uses a sport-analogy where he divides social media strategies into two columns
and two rows. The columns are “attack” and “defend”, while the two rows are “home” and
“away”. On the home side, companies proactively decide which channels to be on and what
the content should portray on the different channels while also deciding upon how to react to
and answer situations which may appear, for example through comments on a Facebook page.
The away field on the other hand, which is both earned and unexplored is trying to proactively
create content which makes others want to speak about the company, while also setting up
Figure 7: What is a social media strategy. Source: David Ledstrup, Marvelous
23
guidelines on how monitor what is being said about it. This sport-analogy can be found in
Figure 8.
All the above is done through the strategy by, for example, setting up internal policies and
tactics for the company’s social media presence.
Figure 8: Model of social media strategy aspects. Source: David Ledstrup, Marvelous.
4.1.1.2 Defining the social media landscape David presents his and Marvelous’ own definition of the current social media landscape,
which is based on a total of three axes: interest, social and professional based platforms.
While developing a social media strategy, it is essential to consider how different the channels
are – and what the users expect from them. He takes up the example of Twitter and YouTube,
which he defines as interest based since the users follow people not necessarily because they
share a relation, but rather that they share an interest in the content that is produced. Social on
the other hand is mediums where you connect with others due to a relationship between you –
David uses the example of Messenger as a social platform, which is almost solely used to talk
to your friends. In the case of Facebook, David notes a shift in what the platform is used for
by saying: “But I would say that Facebook is not a social network anymore, because if you
look at us as users, there is a bigger chance that when you scroll down your feed that it
contains just as much posts about interests we have, or brands that we like and so on and so
forth.”.
He goes on by saying that you can use these three axes to get information of how the target
audience of a company uses the different mediums, and use that information while developing
the social media strategy. He says: “Let’s say we look at a specific company, the target
audience might be from 18-35, and you can actually look at this landscape and ask how this
specific audience acts within this landscape. How do they use Facebook? This target group
probably has Facebook more on the interest side, because they do not use it to post pictures
of food and such, they have moved to doing those things on Instagram, which is more on the
social side.” Building on this, when analyzing the landscape, as much demography as
possible needs to be taken into consideration as there may be significant differences in how
social media platforms are used between target audiences – David notes that even small
24
geographical differences such as Stockholm versus southern Sweden might have differences
in how 20-30-year-old people use Instagram.
4.1.1.3 Setting up goals and evaluations David notes that two essential parts of the strategy should be the goals of the presence and
how to evaluate them. Examples of goals which are brought up are business development,
leads, sales – and the PowerPoint also highlights preference, branding & awareness, product
development, customer relations and media handling as examples that a social media strategy
can help achieve.
Regarding the evaluations, different KPIs need to be set up depending on what the goal of the
strategy is. Having a strategy focusing on sales will have vastly different indicators of success
than what a branding strategy would have. David goes on by saying: “If you decide that we
want to change the preference towards our brand, one of the KPIs would be positive
engagement which you have to measure on sentiment and reach and level of engagement.”
And continue this line of reasoning with “If it is clicks to a webpage, you measure click-
through rate.”.
4.1.2 Analysis of Marvelous’ client
4.1.2.1 Strategy guidelines of the client In 2014, the client approached Marvelous to help them create a strategy for Facebook
specifically, the result is a 48-page document. The document consists of five parts, which will
all briefly be covered in this section.
4.1.2.1.1 General The document begins with general information of the strategy. Initially it goes through the
mission of the client’s presence on Facebook and a few bullet points of how the mission
should be accomplished. It continues by providing information of how Facebook should
differentiate from the other platforms that the client uses, for example their bonus program.
The strategy then covers four distinct phases of the strategy, which are all six months each for
a total of two years. This section also covers the different content that should be produced
during the phases, to serve as guidelines. An example of this is that phase one acts as a period
to test different hypotheses and try out several types of photos and text to find what works and
what does not.
Further on, the strategy has information of the target group which is an extension of the
client’s normal audience due to how the medium can be used to attract a larger audience. This
follows with a description of the social value exchange, describing how the platform cannot
be used in the same way as more traditional media, and that the client must provide the
audience with something that they need, or something that they think they need to attract them
to become potential customers and fans of the brand.
Lastly, this section of the strategy covers which KPIs should be looked at and how to drive
traffic to the Facebook page using the client’s other assets and paid media. The quantitative
KPIs which are covered in this section are reach, engagement and redirections to other digital
assets (clicks to web pages for example). Apart from the quantitative KPIs, different
qualitative ones are also proposed such as a community survey.
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4.1.2.1.2 Guidelines The guidelines section of the strategy covers formalities such as how the brand name and logo
can be used, as well as visual guidelines regarding which colors that the client will use in
different scenarios.
This section also covers employee Facebook policies, meaning how the employees of the
client can and cannot discuss the brand on Facebook. Lastly, this section covers the rules that
must be followed when conducting competitions over Facebook, both through the rules that
Facebook has – but also internal handling of competitions.
4.1.2.1.3 Layout and practicality Layout and practicality handles all practicalities of how a Facebook page is run by showing
simple guides of which options that the client can opt to have such as cover photo and profile
picture. It also shows information on how to update the page information with a few easy-to-
follow guides.
The section wraps up covering EdgeRank – which is Facebook’s algorithm for deciding
visibility and reach. What is covered here is how engagement and other factors are essential to
stay relevant, and important to have in mind when producing content. The strategy does
highlight that: “Note that EdgeRank is adjusted often, and it contains of several other and
more complex factors…”.
4.1.2.1.4 Content and handling Continuing through the strategy, content and handling is a section which initially handles the
client’s tone of voice and identity. As such, a persona for Facebook was created to give
guidelines for speaking, posting and commenting on Facebook to maintain a cohesive style
and tone. Apart from the identity, this part covers a communication tree for the client which
addresses responsibilities for the different departments.
The section then covers all information about the content which is produced. Initially, a
content plan is introduced that helps plan the content for the coming weeks – helping
managers create content which is relevant to the season or large events which can be used to
spin off on. What to keep in mind when producing the content, as well as how to activate the
customers is then covered – one noteworthy aspect is how the client should use social media
for soft selling, which the strategy describes as “The idea behind soft selling is that instead of
shoving products and deals down our customers’ throat, we try to stimulate their needs
through joyful messages that possibly lead to a demand…”. In regard to content, the section
moves on to how to create shareable content which creates a want amongst fans to share it to
their own page, examples which are covered are pictures or joyful updates. Lastly, the content
section covers the frequency of the posts and a few images from other brands to act as
inspiration. Regarding the frequency, the strategy informs how often content should be posted
to ensure that the target audience neither gets overwhelmed or feel that nothing is produced.
Finally, the content and handling section covers how the client should respond in a few
different scenarios – such as responding to general questions, product related questions and
criticism. This section also covers how to handle critique, potential crises and wraps up with a
crisis management guideline for what to do in the case of, for example, a post becoming viral
which can be harmful to the brand.
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4.1.2.1.5 Contact information The strategy document is wrapped up with contact information to all parties involved on the
side of the client, as well as the side of Marvelous.
4.1.2.2 Interview with account manager of the client While interviewing the account manager currently in charge of the client from Marvelous’
side who is up to date with the strategy that is being conducted today, she notes that the
strategy document described above is still very much in line with the day to day work.
However, she notes one minor change that has been made about the Facebook algorithms and
frequency of posts, these recommendations have been changed since the creation to stay
aligned with the development on the platform done by Facebook.
She notes that the main reason why she believes the client invested in the strategy was to act
as a complement to their other channels which are very focused on hard sales, and that this
strategy would act as a lift to the brand – she continues this reasoning by saying: “… but
Facebook has the advantages of connecting with users, and making them feel like they have a
say and influence on the brand,” and: “So it is more a two-way communication platform and
they do not have any other platforms where this is done, so this was their first time having a
strategy, or using social media, then they of course needed a strategy to follow.” She
continues by saying that due to Facebook being a two-way communication platform,
involving users is a way to get more loyal customers and fans but also that Facebook helps
expand the target group, resulting in more potential customers.
The account manager notes that another reason for why the strategy is essential is that it
created internal and external advantages by creating a consensus of the processes, tone of
voice, crisis management and other aspects. The strategy also creates a holistic approach to
the client’s communication channels, ensuring that the communication is aligned with
newsletters, shops etc., ensuring that customers feel like they are talking to the client directly,
no matter which medium it is through.
Other than the above, she notes that the content strategy that has been in place lately is
through five distinct types of posts: Interaction, DIY (do it yourself), Feel-good, Product and
Dark posts. These five distinct types of posts serve different purposes and have different
goals:
Interaction: Used get people to interact with the brand, by either commenting on,
reacting to, sharing or clicking on the content.
o Primary metric: Engagement.
DIY: Used to get down on the consumers’ level by producing a combined product
through different products that the client sells. Helps create projects, and stimulates
users to share their own creations with the client.
o Primary metric: Engagement level in the form of reactions, comments and
shares and users sharing their own creations.
Feel-good: Has the objective to share “nice” information, such as that the client has no
chemicals in their products, or that the sun is shining outside. In one way or another,
the post should stimulate good feelings for the fans without directly promoting an
engagement.
o Primary metric: High reach.
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Products: Information about a product which the client sells. Most often using a link
directly leading to the eCommerce webpage of the client.
o Primary goal: Clicks on an attached link.
Dark post: A post that does not get posted on the client’s timeline, but rather uses a
budget to direct it to consumers who have interacted with posts containing products in
the previous days.
She further notes that dark posts have only been used for a few weeks as this thesis is being
written, and as such the data from these will not be analyzed in the following pages.
The account manager goes on by saying that every eight weeks, they analyze the posts from
the period and present it to the client, and from the learnings of which posts worked well and
which did not – the content plan for the following period adapts. This way, learning what
works with the audience and changing the tactics thus creates a flexibility.
4.1.2.3 Facebook data during a five-month span The following section will cover the data extracted from the client’s Facebook account.
4.1.2.3.1 Page likes Figure 9 shows how the client’s Facebook page’s likes has increased during the five-month
span. Figure 10 shows the weekly page like increase in percentage calculated using the
formula:
Weekly page like increase = ((((Page likes on day X+7) / (Page likes on day X))).
The orange line displays the average increase over the entire course of the five months, which
is a weekly follower increase of 0.236%.
As can be seen on both charts, the increase has been steady over the five months, and includes
three surges where the increase was significantly higher. There have been no periods where
the total number of likes decreased in comparison to the total amount.
Figure 9: Facebook page likes from November 1st 2016 to March 31st 2017.
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Figure 10: Average weekly page like increase from November 1st 2016 to March 31st 2017.
4.1.2.3.2 Page reach Figure 11 shows the weekly page reach during the five-month span. As can be interpreted
from the chart, November and December has a higher paid reach, resulting in a surge during
the first weeks of November, and the first weeks of December. Another thing that can be
interpreted is that a clear majority of the reach is paid – and that the organic reach is more
stable than the paid, which can be seen from the two polynomial trendlines.
The high reach in the beginning of the graph is a result from a Halloween-campaign in late
October, which is not included in the data. However, as the weekly reach is based upon the
last seven days, the impact of the campaign is shown. The average weekly reach over the
period was 390614 unique people.
Figure 11:Weekly page reach from November 1st 2016 to March 31st 2017.
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4.1.2.3.3 Interaction Posts Figure 12 shows the reach of all posts in the period, both organic and paid reach. In total, 11
posts were purely organic and had an average reach of 9767. Nine posts had a spend of
between 3990-4800DKK, which had a reach of between 63500-281200, with CPM’s between
16.8DKK and 55.1DKK. Interestingly, the post with the lowest CPM also had amongst the
lowest engagement rates, both total and from reactions, comments and shares (0.24% total
engagement rate), whereas the post with the highest CPM of the span (55.1DKK) had
amongst the highest engagement rates, with 2.38% total, from which 1.79% were reactions,
comments and shares.
Figure 12: Post reach for Interaction posts from November 1st 2016 to March 31st 2017.
Figure 13 displays the relation between dynamic reach and paid reach for the posts during the
period. Interaction posts have a total of 11 posts which are entirely dynamic, and the lowest
percentage of dynamic reach for a post was 1.9%.
Figure 13:Distribution of dynamic and paid reach for Interaction posts from November 1st 2016 to March 31st 2017.
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Distribution of dynamic and paid reach for Interaction post
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Figure 14 below shows the engagement rate for the interaction posts. Noteworthy is that only
9 of the 29 posts had links attached to them, seven of which had engagement rate of link
clicks as the highest source of engagement. Another noteworthy point is that the engagement
rate of reactions ranged from as low as 0.1% to over 3%.
Figure 14: Engagement rates of Interaction posts from November 1st 2016 to March 31st 2017.
Figure 15 shows the total number of people who have interacted with the different posts, and
which type of engagement that they have performed.
Figure 15: Total amount of engagements for Interaction posts from November 1st 2016 to March 31st 2017.
Table 6 on the following page displays the averages from all the posts during the period,
rounded to two decimals. On average, slightly less than 100000 unique people saw the
interaction posts from the brand, where a considerable portion was from paid reach.
Approximately 0.91% of the people who saw the posts interacted with them, where the most
common interaction was through other types of engagement, such as clicking a photo or
playing a video depending on the post.
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Total amount of engagements for Interaction posts
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Metric Data
Average total reach 98396
Average organic reach 9966.6
Average paid reach 88429
Relation between average organic reach and average paid
reach
1:8.73
Average total engagement rate 0.91%
Average engagement rate of reactions, comments and shares 0.31%
Average engagement rate of link clicks 0.13%
Average engagement rate of other engagements 0.47 %
Table 6: Averages for Interaction posts November 1st 2016 to March 31st 2017.
4.1.2.3.4 DIY posts Figure 16 shows the reach of all posts in the period, both organic and paid. All posts up until
new year’s had a spend of 1500DKK, with their respective reach ranging from 60000-150000
with CPM’s ranging from 12.5-30.5DKK. After new year’s, all posts received a spend of
4000DKK, with their respective reach ranging from 180000-301000 and CPM’s between 7.8-
14.21DKK. As can be read from the chart, none of the posts were purely organic.
Figure 16: Post reach for DIY posts from November 1st 2016 to March 31st 2017.
Figure 17 displays the relation between dynamic reach and paid reach for the posts during the
period. Throughout the period, the dynamic reach ranges from 11% to 26%.
Figure 17: Distribution of dynamic and paid reach for DIY posts from November 1st 2016 to March 31st 2017.
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Distribution of dynamic and paid reach for DIY posts
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Figure 18 shows the engagement rate of the posts. Note that only 2 of the posts had a link in
them, which had low clicks – resulting in that it can barely be seen on the graph.
Figure 18: Engagement rates for DIY posts from November 1st 2016 to March 31st 2017.
Figure 19 shows the total amount of the different engagements for all the post. As can be
interpreted from the graph, the first three posts had the three out of four highest amounts of
engagements, while also having amongst the lowest reaches – resulting in very high
engagement rates.
Figure 19: Total amount of engagements for DIY posts from November 1st 2016 to March 31st 2017.
Table 7 below displays the averages from all the posts during the period, rounded to two
decimals. On average, close to 170000 unique people saw the DIY posts, from which slightly
less than 2% engaged with the material at hand.
Metric Data
Average total reach 169890
Average organic reach 29145
Average paid reach 140744
Relation between average organic reach and average paid
reach
1:4.83
Average total engagement rate 1.92%
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Average engagement rate of reactions, comments and
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Average engagement rate of link clicks 0.00%
Average engagement rate of other engagements 1.49% Table 7: Averages for DIY posts from November 1st 2016 to March 31st 2017.
4.1.2.3.5 Feel-good posts Figure 20 below shows the reach of the posts categorized as feel-good. What can be
interpreted from the graph is that a total of seven posts were entirely organic. Six posts had a
spend of 4000-4800DKK, with a reach between 56000-172500 and a CPM ranging from 17-
43DKK. Four posts were boosted by 8000-8800DKK from which the reach ranged from
218000-343000, and CPM’s between 13.6-25.3DKK. This entails that in comparison to DIY
posts, the CPM was higher for most the posts.
Figure 20: Post reach for Feel-good posts from November 1st 2016 to March 31st 2017.
Figure 21 displays the relation between dynamic reach and paid reach for the posts during the
period.
Figure 21: Distribution of dynamic and paid reach for Feel-good posts from November 1st 2016 to March 31st 2017.
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Distribution of dynamic and paid reach for Feel-good posts
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Figure 22 below shows the different engagement rates of all Feel-good posts during the
period. 15 of the 20 posts had a link attached to theme, whereas five of the posts only had
engagements through reactions, comments, shares and other engagements. The total
engagement rate varied from 0.17% to 4.1%.
Figure 22: Engagement rates of Feel-good posts from November 1st 2016 to March 31st 2017.
Figure 23, as seen below, shows the total amount of different engagements of the posts. Once
again, do note that only 7 of the 20 posts had a link in them which makes that metric only
show up in approximately one third of the posts.
Figure 23: Total amount of engagements for Feel-good posts from November 1st 2016 to March 31st 2017.
Table 8 on the next page shows the averages of the metrics seen above rounded to two
decimals. Do note, that the average engagement rates are low because some of the posts with
the highest reach did poorly based on engagement. If only looking at the mean value of all
posts without weighing in reach, the average total engagement rate would be 1.63%. As such,
if posts with a high amount of reach perform badly, the numbers may appear skewed.
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Metric Data
Average total reach 124632
Average organic reach 12442
Average paid reach 112190
Relation between average organic reach and average paid
reach
1:9.02
Average total engagement rate 0.94%
Average engagement rate of reactions, comments and shares 0.21%
Average engagement rate of link clicks 0.34%
Average engagement rate of other engagements 0.39% Table 8: Averages for Feel-good posts from November 1st 2016 to March 31st 2017.
4.1.2.3.6 Product posts Figure 24 below shows the reach for all posts during the period. Only one post was purely
organic, while most of them were boosted. Six of the posts in the range of 66000-120000 had
a spend of 4000DKK, meaning that the CPM for the posts ranged from 22.4-42.2DKK. Three
posts had a budget of 2400DKK, with a reach between 62500-92500, and a CPM of 20.7-
27.2DKK. One thing to note is that the second and fifth post are black Friday and the holiday
sales respectively.
Figure 24: Post reach for Product posts from November 1st 2016 to March 31st 2017.
The below Figure, 25, shows the distribution between dynamic and paid reach for the period.
Figure 25: Distribution of dynamic and paid reach for Product posts from November 1st 2016 to March 31st 2017.
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Distribution of dynamic and paid reach for Product posts
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Figure 26, as seen below, displays the engagement rates for the product posts. The second
post, as stated above, is a post informing about black Friday sale, which reached 12.15%
engagement rate, from which 11.6% were link clicks. The first post had the lowest
engagement rate, which was at 0.15%.
Figure 26: Engagement rates for Product posts from November 1st 2016 to March 31st 2017.
Figure 27 displays the total amount of engagements for the various posts. Do note that the
black Friday and holiday sale posts have been removed from the graph, as their numbers
diluted the graph beyond readability. The black Friday post had 557 reactions, 24667 link
clicks and 678 other forms of engagement, and the Christmas sale post had 133 reactions,
5502 link clicks and 327 other types of engagement.
Figure 27: Total amount of engagements for Product posts from November 1st 2016 to March 31st 2017.
Table 9 on the next page displays the averages from all the posts during the period, rounded to
two decimals. On average, slightly less than 100000 people saw the posts, and had an average
link click rate of 3.24% – higher than other categorizations of posts entire engagement rate.
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Engagement rates of Product posts
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Metric Data
Average total reach 95414
Average organic reach 12397
Average paid reach 83016
Relation between average organic reach and average paid
reach
1:6.7
Average total engagement rate 3.84%
Average engagement rate of reactions, comments and shares 0.22%
Average engagement rate of link clicks 3.24%
Average engagement rate of other engagements 0.38% Table 9: Averages for Product posts from November 1st 2016 to March 31st 2017.
4.2 Interviews with industry professionals The results from the interviews with industry professionals will be presented on the following
pages. The headings introduce the questions being answered.
4.2.1 Reasons and goals for investing in a social media
strategy
4.2.1.1 Most common reasons for investing in a social media
strategy The answers to the question what the interviewees believed were the most common reasons
for deciding to invest in a social media strategy, were quite varied. Five of the interviewees
agreed that there was a large lack of knowledge in the field but that firms do realize they must
be on social media. Because of this lack of knowledge, the companies choose to invest in a
social media strategy to help them guide their social media activities and presence. Other
reasons for realizing why companies must be on social media included being where the
customers are, realizing that their competitors are doing it and so should they and realizing
that they need to have a strategy connecting social media to their other communicative
channels. Lastly, the fact that the companies might previously have abused social media
platforms and need to correct their mistakes was mentioned. Interviewee 2 noted that “I
believe that if you as a company want to communicate with your target audience you should
be where the target audience is, and more or less everyone in the world is on social media”.
Many of the interviewees believed that the lack of knowledge may be due to a generation gap.
One interviewee states that many of the people who oversee marketing departments for
various firms are older and trust the way marketing has been done for many years. But they
are just now starting to realize the potential of social media and decide to invest in a strategy
to wrap their minds around the medium.
4.2.1.2 Most common goals of social media strategies Regarding which the most common goals for a social media strategy for businesses are, all
interviewees agreed that the two most common goals were to use social media as a channel to
increase the brand strength as well as drive sales. Other goals which were mentioned was
using social media as a channel to increase the reach of the business and to drive traffic to
other digital assets, for example by getting the consumers to sign up for a newsletter. Other
goals that the interviewees answered were raising awareness of the brand, using the channel
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for product development by having a direct link with the consumers as well as informing the
target audience of important questions about the company.
4.2.2 Strategy creation process
4.2.2.1 Which steps are taken when creating a social media
strategy “Then I believe that your starting point should be what your needs are – what the company
has, and what it needs. And then where the target audience is, this is our audience – where
are they? And then you have to take the aspect of capacity.” – Interviewee 5.
“First and foremost why, why should we be here? Which channels? For whom? You try to
perform a target audience analysis and connect it to other brand communication.” –
Interviewee 6.
The interviewees agreed that at the start of any strategy creation, companies need to start by
conducting a current situation analysis. The analysis should target both the target audience
trying to figure out their behaviors, as well as analyzing the current social media landscape –
and then combine the two to decide which social media platforms should be integrated into
the strategy. This process also requires the companies at hand to do an internal investigation
of capacity and current communication means to prevent creating a strategy involving too
many platforms, and prevent using social media to fulfil goals which other communication
assets already are. The goals should then be set up to complement the already existing ones.
Many of the interviewees stress that there should both be overarching goals, connecting to the
core of the business, as well as smaller goals which may either be for a specific period or even
on a post to post basis. For example, interviewee 2 says that “I believe that it is good to have
overarching goals, which are business goals, branding goals – those goals should be more
overarching. Then I also believe that you need to have a thought in everything that you do. It
should feel thorough and thought through”.
The process should then continue by creating a content strategy, which should act as a toolbox
for how to create and communicate the content for the various platforms. The interviewees
note that this toolbox should include aspects such as tone of voice, frequency of posts,
guidelines on how organic and paid posts are used and the above-mentioned goals for each
channel and specific post. The interviewees agree that the reason for why the toolbox should
be created is to create a more holistic communication experience throughout the channels,
while also highlighting how the different social media channels complement each other based
on what the target audience’s behavior and expectations on the different platforms are.
Lastly, some of the interviewees note that it is essential to create policies regarding employee
social media usage, a framework to measure success and adapt strategy from and setting up a
crisis management plan. The policies should act as help for the employees while also ensuring
that different responsibilities are communicated properly through the organization.
4.2.2.2 Most common mistakes while creating a strategy When asked the question of what the interviewees believed were the most common mistakes
which are made by those who either do not invest in a strategy or fail in following up on their
strategy, all the interviewees agreed that there is a clear trend that companies do not take their
own capacity into consideration. This can be noticed through, for example, companies
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creating a social media presence on several different platforms without having the means to
follow up on them. One interviewee pointed out that such a mistake might result in
detrimental damage, as the audience expects to be entertained. Another common answer,
which relates to the first one, is that the companies re-use content throughout channels –
either by producing a more traditional TV-ad and placing it on social media, or even using the
same content on more than one social media platform.
Further on, interviewees pointed out that a common mistake was not realizing that social
media revolves around two-way communication and using the channel as a megaphone
shouting a message at their audience. Also, not investing any money into boosting posts and
believing that organic reach would be sufficient was pointed out as a mistake, and in addition
to that also expecting overnight results – not realizing that building a presence takes time.
Lastly, isolating social media from other communication and realizing just how important the
produced content is were mentioned.
4.2.3 Evaluation of strategy
4.2.3.1 Setting up key performance indicators While discussing the question of how to set up KPIs for the strategy, several of the
interviewees stress the importance of connecting the goals to both the overarching goals of the
strategy, but also to the content – some going even far enough to say that every single post
should have its own goals, and hence have its own measurements. Therefore, depending on
the goal of each post, a variety of different KPIs can be set up.
For example, when posting content for a specific product or campaign, either tracking the
percentage of the people who follow that link – or using even more advanced tools to track if
the customer finalizes a purchase. Other metrics mentioned by most the interviewees included
engagement of posts and the page, total likes of the page and reach. Engagement rate should
both look at the number of people who react, comment or share the post, while also looking at
other engagement metrics such as clicks or video views according to the interviewees.
One aspect pointed out by interviewee 3 is that an internal framework for measurement needs
to be set up. The interviewee states that “We calculate it, we have a standard CPM which we
reckon we should be on – which is a reference frame based on our previous campaigns.
Because if you start on the bottom, you must use a media bureaus recommendation as they
have had previous similar clients, but after a while you know what it should cost. You know
how much it should cost to reach X amount of people during a specific set of time. And then
you can use that as the reference frame.” And continues by adding that other KPIs should
also get their set reference frames.
4.2.3.2 Using the key performance indicators to evaluate
strategy “You can not just work long term, you have to be a lot more agile – because things change so
fast. Not just the channels, but also what content works, since it is tied to timeliness and what
is happening right not. So, something you think may work now may not work at all in six
months.” – Interviewee 5.
When asked the question how to use the result of the KPIs and other factors to adapt the
strategy as time progresses – all the interviewees noted that the core goals of the strategy
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should not change, as they are the fundamental reason for why the company is on social
media. However, they all agreed that the aspect which companies must change over time is
the tactics used when producing content. This can be done by seeing and analyzing which
type of content works and which does not, which times that are the most beneficial to post at
and which channels are gaining the most traction amongst consumers.
Interviewee 4 notes that companies should keep testing new ideas out and test new hypotheses
of how the target audience expects to be entertained – and how they react to different types of
content. By not trying out anything new, the audience may grow tired of seeing the same type
of material over time which can result in a bad experience, and a decreased preference
towards the brand.
However, an important note which was brought up by interviewee 6 is that “And today our
hands are extremely tied up by algorithms on all channels. Which you have tried breaking
down in all ways possible – for example, I worked a lot with a client for whom we on a
monthly basis went through all post, which had done well and which had done poorly? And
then we brought Facebook in on different meetings. But the problem is that they talk about
relevance in their algorithm. The last day it became sort of a guessing game, meaning that
what performed great and what performed poorly was many types almost the same post at the
same time. We had the same conditions, but sometimes we were lucky and other times not. So,
and there is a lot to it – you can have a great content strategy connected to time and history,
but you constantly have to keep testing.”
4.2.4 Advantages of social media marketing
4.2.4.1 Advantages of social media marketing in comparison to
more traditional marketing When the interviewees were asked what the main advantages of social media marketing
compared to more traditional marketing and advertising – all the interviewees mentioned the
fact that social media creates a two-way communication channel. The two-way
communication channel will, if handled properly, lead to more personal relations and
therefore a stronger sense of loyalty between the company and its consumers, according to the
interviewees. However, one of the interviewees does stress that the two-way communication
may end up in bad publicity if done incorrectly, and that a strategy is essential to handle the
relations in a manner that the consumers expect it.
Further on, five of the interviewees note that social media marketing creates a much more
flexible environment to work in, where hypotheses can be tested as well as new approaches.
This flexibility and agility also translates into the content at hand, interviewee 4 says that
“You can cancel a campaign. If you have invested 10000 in something on Facebook, you can
change your mind after 500 crowns if you realize it is doing poorly – which you cannot do if
you decide to print something, then done is done.”. This results in campaigns which might
otherwise have had a large budget behind them being terminated with minimal loss, if the
audience is not receiving it the way it was meant to be received.
Another aspect which three of the interviewees mentioned regarding advantageous of social
media marketing as opposed to more traditional was the fact that companies can target a very
specific audience. Using the built-in tools supplied by the different platforms, a decision can
be made upon exactly which target audience to reach and have a high accuracy of targeting
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them. As an example of this, interviewee 4 uses a made-up example saying “You can find
people who live in Farsta and are extremely interested in their Ica Nära. I mean, you can find
them and talk only to them. You are not wasting your money on anyone else.”, where Farsta is
a town in Sweden, and Ica Nära is a store.
The two remaining reasons mentioned by a few of the interviewees were that social media is
more cost efficient and that social media grants companies access to a lot more data. In regard
to the cost efficiency, the interviewee discussed that the quality of the content is not as
important as for example a TV advertisement, which drastically reduces the production cost.
While discussing social media data, the interviewee mentioned that companies have a lot of
data such as how many people have seen the content, who has seen it including their
demography, how they have reacted to it while also being able to look at hard numbers of
what the return on investment on for example product-related posts are through conversion
rates.
4.2.1.2 Advantages of a successfully executed strategy Other notable advantages of a successfully executed strategy, which may not relate directly to
one of the above-mentioned questions, that were acknowledged during the interviews will be
explained below.
Interviewee 3 discussed the fact that companies may apply a strategy encouraging their users
to create content on their behalf. Social media enhances the possibilities that customers have
when they want to reciprocate the actions of the companies at hand. The interviewee
continues by saying that any type of action on behalf of the consumer in the form of reacting,
sharing and commenting is a form of word-of-mouth, as the actions may seem as a seal of
approval to their respective peers. This type of engagement may not always result in direct
sales depending on the goal of the post, but it creates a top of mind for the consumers, which
may result in choosing a product of the company as opposed to the competitors down the line.
Another aspect which was mentioned by interviewee 1 and 6 is that social media enables
companies to compare themselves to their direct competitors. Not only can brands look at
what type of content they are producing, but also see how their target audience is reacting to it
through public social media data. This can help guide actions to either win over the
competitor’s customers, or by enhancing the company’s presence by adapting to the
competitors.
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5 Discussion and analysis This section will cover relevant discussions and analyses. The section begins with why social
media should be added to the marketing repertoire and continues by presenting the life cycle
of a social media strategy. The section will then cover advantages gained from a strategy, an
aspect of sustainability & ethics and wrap up with methodology criticism.
5.1 Social media – the essential addition to the
marketing repertoire There is no doubt that social media marketing is here to stay with social media gaining
increasing traction both amongst the people and businesses. No matter what the reason for
deciding to start marketing through social media is, the advantages of successfully doing so
are becoming increasingly apparent. With reasons such as realizing that the companies must
be where the consumers are, the need for a more cost-effective channel and trying to match
what the competition is doing – social media is increasingly becoming part of the toolbox
which is marketing.
Bruhn et al. (2012) findings still hold true that social media is increasingly replacing
traditional media. One of the interviewees noted that a few distinct companies now chooses to
invest approximately 80% of their marketing budget in digital media, where a substantial
portion of that is on social media. The research conducted by Dimitriadis & Tsimonis (2014)
is further backed up by this thesis, as it shows how industry professionals are certain that one
of the primary objectives of social media is that of branding activities and the possibilities of
monitoring, listening and interacting with consumers on their own terms.
What social media marketing supplies to the marketing repertoire which traditional marketing
means lack is a multitude of aspects. First and foremost is the fact that it grants companies an
opportunity to create a two-way communication with their consumers – this was highlighted
by all of the interviewees as well as previous research, such as Perkin (2008). This two-way
communication enables companies to strengthen the bond and loyalty with their consumers,
while also granting a new opportunity to direct product and business development in a
direction the consumers agree with by listening to instantaneous feedback given by the
consumers. A second advantage of social media is that it is extremely flexible, it grants
companies an opportunity to test out how the content plays with their audience before
deciding how much money to invest in each separate campaign – meaning that if something
does not work as well as companies had planned, there is a possibility to cancel it before
spending more money on it. Take print for example, companies need to decide on a definitive
version before printing it in thousands, if not tens of thousands of copies without knowing
how the audience will interpret it.
Another strength of social media is that the platforms enable companies to do very precise
targeting, as stated by two of the interviewees – companies can find an exact audience and
direct the message to them, without having to pay for people outside of the target group which
might otherwise have seen it. Lastly, one aspect which is inherit to all digital media which
does not exist in more traditional media is an immense amount of data. Companies can gain
valuable insights in which demographics are inherent to the people engaging with their
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content, while also receiving exact numbers of how many people interact with it, follow links
or even go through with finalizing purchases.
But not only the above, the nature of social media and the user-generated content which is
inherent to the ideological foundations of the platforms (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010),
companies have the possibility to make their consumers active co-creators of their brand (Goh
et al., 2013). Some of the interviewees, as well as previous research also highlights how social
media is a prime channel for electronic word-of-mouth. One could argue that the form of
reacting to a post, commenting on it or sharing it is a way for consumers to show their
affection towards a brand to their immediate social network – which helps the companies
immensely, as any form of statement taken by other consumers weighs heavier for purchase
decisions than those of companies (Godes & Mayzlin, 2004).
5.2 Social media strategy life cycle framework
5.2.1 Full framework Figure 28, as seen below, is the life cycle of a social media strategy. The framework was
developed by combining previous research, as found in chapter 2, with the example of an
already developed social media strategy and insights of the industry professionals as
presented in chapter 4. In total, the social media strategy life cycle consists of six stages: pre-
assessment, strategy creation, basics and hypotheses, maturation & capitalization, short-term
evaluations and lastly long-term evaluations. These stages will be individually covered in the
following pages, after first presenting which common mistakes that need to be avoided when
creating a strategy.
Figure 28: Social media strategy life cycle.
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5.2.2 Common mistakes to avoid while developing a
strategy A lack of knowledge of social media marketing is prominent, which may result in social
media efforts not granting companies the exposure and success which they had anticipated.
One of the most prominent mistakes which was highlighted by Perkin (2008) and Davidson
(2014), and further backed up by this research is that companies treat social media as a
broadcasting platform, using it to direct a one-way communication towards an audience on a
platform where they are not expecting it. This type of megaphone broadcasting endangers the
brand by causing negative relations to their consumers.
Another common mistake is for businesses forgetting to take the aspect of capacity into
consideration, and therein create a presence on too many different platforms. The interviews
conducted in this research shows that creating a presence and not filling it with content in a
way which the consumers expect may endanger the relation between the two parties. The
aspect of capacity also comes into play when companies decide to re-use the same content on
various platforms, without realizing the implications that the platforms have.
Lastly, isolating social media from other company communication efforts, and not boosting
posts through paid marketing are two mistakes which need to be avoided. Social media should
be an extension of already existing marketing efforts, and not a silo isolated from the rest. By
not boosting posts and relying entirely on organic reach, companies are restricting themselves
to an extremely small portion of their target audience, with very small opportunities of
expanding their presence and expanding their customer base through social media.
5.2.3 Pre-assessment stage In the pre-assessment stage, companies need to do an internal investigation of the overarching
business and marketing goals to analyze and find what aspect of marketing that social media
should fulfill by complementing current marketing. This investigation must consider the
capacity of which the firm has upon which all choices should be made in accordance to.
While conducting this analysis, having knowledge of the fundamentals of how social media
works, and which functions that a strategy can assist in fulfilling is essential.
When the overarching goals are edged out, the process needs to continue by analyzing the
target audience and the social media environment – something which all interviewees agreed
upon. The target audience and social media environment analysis should be conducted
together, as the results of this study through the interview with David and the other industry
professionals highlights that different target audiences may use the same social media
platforms differently – meaning that companies must figure out where the audience is, and
how they use the various platforms. The social media environment should be analyzed using
local statistics, and incorporating them into frameworks such as those suggested by, for
example, David in chapter 4.1, Kietzmann et al. (2011) or Solis & JESS3 (2017)
The result from this stage of the strategy creation should be the overarching goals of why the
strategy exists, a thorough target audience analysis for the strategy as well as a decision for
which channels to incorporate into the strategy.
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5.2.4 Strategy creation stage The second stage is where the actual strategy is created. At this point, overarching goals of the
strategy, a target audience analysis and choice of channels should already exist and be the
basis of all decisions. This part of the creation stage looks at five factors, described below.
5.2.4.1 Long-term goals of the presence The first thing which needs to be decided upon are the long-term goals of the presence. The
most commonly mentioned goals from this research suggests that companies use social media
to increase brand strength, increase sales, increase reach of company which expands the
consumer basis by finding new potential customers, drive traffic to other assets such as a
webpage or increase brand awareness. In the interview with David, he also highlighted that
other goals which are frequent are product and business development, customer service and
media handling.
These findings correlate with research conducted prior, where for example Weinberg (2009)
highlights similar findings. And the decision on which primary goals that the strategy has is
essential for the rest of the strategy development as every choice must be made in accordance
to it.
5.2.4.2 Content strategy, including short-term goals. The content strategy is vital as it provides a strategy for one of the main links between
consumers and companies – the actual content which is posted. This strategy should include
aspects such as frequency of posts, tone of voice, visual guidelines and guidelines for how to
respond to questions on the page. Moreover, the content strategy should suggest how the
content of the different channels are adapted to their dissimilarities and how the balance of
organic and paid marketing efforts should be handled in practice. In addition to this, the
section needs to set up guidelines for what the different short-term goals of the posts are. As
can be seen in chapter 4.1, the client had a categorization of four types of posts, which had
different underlying reasons for being posted and therein had different goals. One could even
go a step further and define a goal for every single post – however, following up on this
through data analysis might prove cumbersome in the long run.
Figure 7 in 4.1.1.1 shows that one of the axes in what David defines as a strategy is tactics,
which can be translated into this content strategy. One of the interviewees noted that content
is one of the fundamental factors for succeeding on social media, and should be analyzed and
executed accordingly. This should come as no surprise, as the content is the primary
connection between the consumer and the company on social media. One tactic which was
used in the case study, as well as noted by two of the interviewees was using a content
calendar, a week by week, or month by month calendar of all posts which are to be posted and
their respective goals and metrics. A content calendar helps companies gain an overview of
which messages are directed towards the consumers over a specific period, and may assist in
achieving the goals set up in 5.2.4.1.
Another tactic which can be used is to actively create content which encourages consumers to
become active in either creating user-generated content of engaging in some form of eWOM.
One tactic to encourage user-generated content is by studying the antecedents proposed by
Barger et al. (2016), or understanding the motives for which consumers actively become
contributors or co-creators of content as proposed by Muntinga et al. (2011) – both of which
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can be found in chapter 2.4.2. In the case study of Marvelous’ client, the DIY posts are
created to stimulate the consumers to share their own projects – which is one form of user-
generated content. The interaction posts have a primary goal to get the consumers to react,
share and comment the posts, creating an eWOM and buzz regarding the brand.
5.2.4.3 Measurement framework The third aspect of the strategy creation in this stage of the life cycle is the measurement
framework, i.e. which metrics that the company should look at regarding both long-term goals
and short-term goals for the various posts. Examples of metrics which can be used, as derived
from both the interviews and the case study are:
Page likes.
Engagement rate in the form of reactions, comments and shares.
Engagement rate in other forms.
Reach of posts.
Click-through rate for links.
Generated sales.
The measurement framework should primarily be based on internal numbers and needs to be
iterated over time, see stage three and five of the life cycle. It can also prove useful to have
both quantitative and qualitative metrics. For example, if one of the main goals of the strategy
is to increase brand strength, doing a sentiment-analysis on a target group at two different
times, and see how the sentiment has changed over time could provide valuable information.
Setting up an internal process, such as one similar to the evaluation process proposed by
Keegan & Rowley (2017), is essential for how the success of the strategy evolves over time,
and helps guide key actions for management.
It is important to note that some of the strengths of social media may be hard to measure
through metrics. For example, the industry is still facing problems with establishing the worth
of consumers engaging in the content through reactions – as many times it is difficult to track
a decision back to social media. Perhaps a consumer saw a friend react positively to a post on
Facebook and therein got the brand on his mind, that same consumer might go into a physical
store and purchase something due to that, something that is impossible to track back to the
social media presence.
5.2.4.4 Policies The process continues by setting up policies as suggested by the interviewees and research
(Felix et al., 2017; Kietzmann et al., 2011). The policies should help guide the employees of
the firm regarding social media usage, for example by setting up precise guidelines of what
can and cannot be written or by setting up a hierarchy of who has access to the company
social media accounts and therein handle the contact with consumers. Felix et al. (2017)
suggest that this is done through deciding where on the spectrum between anarchy and
autocracy these policies should be which is on a company to company basis depending on
what their respective culture is. Another factor that goes into deciding how strict the policies
should be is company size.
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5.2.4.5 Crisis management plan The last step of this stage of the life cycle is one which could be found in the client’s strategy
and was suggested by the interviewees, namely setting up a crisis management plan. This plan
should set up a structure and processes of what to do in case the company receives bad
publicity over social media. Today, consumers are enabled to share their opinions with
thousands of other like-minded consumers and even if an opinion is directly harmful to a
company, it can catch traction and spread virally. As such, setting up a process for how to
respond and handle it internally can prove helpful in those cases.
5.2.5 Basics and hypotheses stage The third stage of the life cycle is when companies start implementing the strategy in practice
and is called the basics and hypotheses stage. In this stage, starting to implement the basics
and establishing the company’s social media presence is key. This stage also has the objective
of trying out different hypotheses on content about what the company believes performs well
with the target audience, and what does not – and then trying it out in practice.
There is no exact length of this stage, but in the case of the client in this research, the initial
phase of getting the basics of the presence sorted was approximately six months. In this stage,
it is important to constantly try out new types of content to get a deeper understanding of what
the target audience responds positively and negatively towards. And while doing so tweak the
content strategy, i.e. the tactics of the strategy.
Once the company believes that they have a good understanding of what type of content
works best, the measurement framework developed in stage two should be iterated and re-
adjusted to fit the values seen in practice and possibly change the metrics depending on what
is suitable for the new tactics being used.
5.2.6 Maturation and capitalization stage The fourth stage of the life cycle, maturation and capitalization, is reached once companies
feel that their presence on social media is established and that the presence is nearing a point
of constant growth. Once reaching this stage businesses have understood the fundamentals of
their strategy and are communicating with the consumers on their terms, as equals. As was
noted by one of the interviewees, it is next to impossible to receive an overnight success on
social media which is why companies must go through stage three before reaching the stage
of capitalization.
One important aspect to note about stage four is that the overarching goals, the long-term
goals and the short-term goals of the strategy should all be fruitful and companies should start
seeing the results from the actions performed on social media. Exactly what these advantages
are will be covered further in chapter 5.3 – but are of course different depending on what the
goals of the strategy are, and the execution of it.
This stage is entered after stage three and continues endlessly, while weaving in stage five and
six at set time intervals (see chapters 5.2.7 and 5.2.8).
5.2.7 Short-term evaluation stage The short-term evaluation stage is when companies look at a specific time frame and analyze
the success of the social media efforts, primarily by looking at all respective posts and
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conducting an analysis in accordance to the measurement framework of the strategy. This
stage should occur on a set frequency defined in the strategy – in the example of the case of
this study, this evaluation occurred every eight weeks. The interviewees mentioned a
frequency ranging from every few weeks to every few months. In the evaluation process
proposed by Keegan & Rowley (2017), one way to set up the frequency is on a campaign-to-
campaign basis.
The primary reason for why this stage is an important part of the life cycle is that social media
content should be tied to relevancy and timeliness, and the fact that companies constantly
need to strive to evolve their social media efforts by learning from past experiences. This was
mentioned in many of the interviews, noting that companies must be willing to try new
approaches and tactics about the content. Based on the results of the content evaluation,
companies should make slight re-adjustments to their content strategy, and even minor
modifications to the measurement framework. If using a content calendar, the evaluation stage
should lay the foundation of the following period leading up to the next evaluation.
One thing that must be mentioned is to not read too much into why one specific post did
poorly. The evaluation should be over several posts to get a larger sample size, and therein
have a larger statistical basis to make decisions upon. This ties back to what interviewee 6
stated as presented in chapter 4.2.3.2, that companies hands are tied by the algorithms of
social media platforms. As the interviewee stated, two posts which were extremely similar
with similar conditions could perform vastly different. The success or poor-performance of
one post should therefore not vastly change the content tactics, as it can sometimes just be
attributed to luck. However, if similar content produces poor results over a large sample size,
companies need to reconsider their tactics and start adjusting accordingly.
5.2.8 Long-term evaluation stage The last stage of the life cycle is also a stage which should appear on a set frequency, as
defined in the strategy. The long-term evaluation stage is when companies do a new analysis
of the target audience and the social media environment to be able to detect changes in
behavior. As was noted by interviewee 5, the efforts which are successful today might not
work at all in six months due to how the target audience has changed their behaviors on the
different platforms, or moved to new platforms entirely.
This stage could be set on a frequency of analyzing these factors every 12 months, or every 18
months for example. What this stage can supply the strategy with is the possibility to detect
changes in behavior while it is happening, or even predict how the target audience will shift in
the coming period, granting companies an opportunity to restructure the strategy appropriately
and therein capitalize on it. This provides companies a solid foundation to make business
decisions upon, rather than changing the strategy based on gut-feeling indicators, which some
of the interviewees had noticed from their clients. Making solid decisions based on thorough
analyses can guide companies in the right direct and helps avoid rash decisions.
5.3 Advantages of a successfully executed
strategy The advantages of a successful strategy come in many different forms. As was noted in 5.1 –
social media grants companies a two-way communication channel which helps strengthen the
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bond and increases the loyalty. Moreover, some of the interviewees noted that one of the
primary reasons for why businesses choose to invest in a strategy altogether is about
availability and being where the customers are. In today’s digital society, customers expect to
be able to find companies where they see fit. As was noted by one of the interviewees, today
consumers look for information online either through search engines or go directly to social
media to find it. On search engines, Facebook pages often show up in the top five results
when searching for a company, and as such consumers often decide to follow those links. This
is an opportunity which must be capitalized upon, because there may be potential customers
being lost if they cannot find what they are looking for easily.
Another large advantage is dependent on the different goals laid out in the strategy. These
goals are often achieved, such as creating a stronger brand, increasing the sales of a company,
driving traffic to various other channels such as web pages or getting consumers to sign up for
a newsletter, increasing the customer basis through reach and helping product and business
development altogether by instantaneously receiving feedback. In the case study of this
research, the client could reach hundreds of thousands of consumers with their content, and
out of these consumer’s various engagement levels followed. Just to name two – product posts
reached tens of thousands of unique consumers, and as high as 11.6% of said reach clicked on
a link, and presumably a portion of those finalized purchases. In the case of the DIY posts,
posts also reached tens of thousands of consumers, with engagement levels as high as 6.05%,
and out of those consumers some shared their own creations granting the client user-generated
content to help strengthen the brand.
But not only the above, social media is an extremely cost-efficient marketing channel as was
noted by a few of the interviewees. Companies can do extreme targeting, finding consumers
who share exact criteria and direct the message only to those consumers without paying any
excess money. In this research, the client had CPM’s as low as 10.5DKK when reaching over
1000000 consumers matching target audience criteria. The average CPM for all boosted posts
in the time was 27.34DKK – which is still cheap. Moreover, the cost efficiency is a result of
consumers not expecting the same quality of content on social media as they would on, for
example, TV. This means that companies can output a high frequency of content with a
smaller budget.
5.4 Sustainability and ethics By investing in a social media strategy and using the life cycle presented in 5.2, companies set
themselves up for more sustainable marketing efforts over social media. Through stage five
and six, the life cycle assists companies in sustaining the strategy over a long period by
guiding the content to stay relevant to the target audience’s expectations and assisting in
directing the marketing efforts on different platforms as the social media environment
changes and evolves.
These marketing efforts may provide economical sustainability for the businesses at hand by
being able to target new audiences and therein strengthen the business’ levels of sales.
However, this extreme targeting of consumers based on their previous activities on the
platforms as well as their demographics brings up the question of ethics. One end of the
spectrum could argue that it is unethical to exploit consumers by having a distinct amount of
information of their past Internet activities whereas the other end of the spectrum highlights
that this targeting brings a form of value to both the consumers and companies by exposing
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them to each other based on shared interests. No matter which side of the spectrum you are
on, it is important to inform the general public about these algorithms to help them understand
why they are seeing this content in their feed. A larger understanding of the targeting of
digital advertising needs to be developed to help the public in in their decisions.
5.5 Method criticism In total, six aspects of the method were identified that could be remarked upon. The following
section will cover what those aspects and the underlying reasons for why these aspects were
not included in the methodology.
5.5.1 Lack of interviews with consumers The research lacked interviews with how consumers react to content over social media, and
how they feel that they are affected by it. The opinions of customers were either received
through the literature study, or by the word of the industry professionals interviewed through
semi-structured interviews. One aspect which could have been added to the research is that of
contacting a distinct number of consumers who have engaged with the content of Marvelous’
client to get an understanding of their underlying reasons for doing so. Not only would this
provide useful information regarding the content strategy, but it would also grant researchers
additional information on what consumers expect on social media.
However, since this thesis main research question is about developing a social media strategy
for marketing purposes, the views of those who actively work with doing so were valued
higher.
5.5.2 Need to cover up exact data numbers Another aspect worthy of noticing, which was highlighted in chapter 3.2.1, is that specific
data was masked by multiplying a coefficient in the range of 1.0-2.0 to it. This was done to
avoid traceability back to the client being analyzed, but does somewhat distort the image of
what the client is getting from this strategy. However, as this was highlighted already in
chapter 3.2.1, the readers of this thesis should look at the numbers critically and understand
that they might be as low as half of what is being shown.
5.5.3 Incomplete data set As was noted in chapter 3.2.1, the exact spend on all posts was not available to me during this
thesis. As such, elaborate analyses of how the different variables correlated could not be
performed. The data was therefore used primarily to show how a large retail actor balanced
their Facebook presence between organic and paid content, and which numbers of reach and
engagement could be achieved.
5.5.4 Old strategy document The strategy in the case study was developed back in 2014. As such, those who developed the
strategy were not actively interviewed as to which choices had been made. The interview was
made with the current account manager, who was not working for Marvelous back in 2014.
Therefore, the choices for why some decisions were made might not have been 100%
accurate. However, as the current account manager knows the client well enough, and the
reasons for the choices are also written in the actual strategy, this should not be the case.
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5.5.5 Interviews with competition of Marvelous All interviewees were informed that this thesis was written together with Marvelous before
the interviews took place. Due to this, some of them may have been restricting what they said
to not accidentally disclose any company secrets to their direct competitors.
However, all the interviewees were informed that what they said during the interviews was
strictly between them, me and this thesis – and that the result of this thesis would be public
and available for anyone to find.
5.5.6 Interview transcription All interviews were both held and transcribed in Swedish. While translating some of their
quotes, minor language differences may not translate correctly to English. The translations
were however confirmed with at least 2 other parties before being finalized.
5.5.7 Primary focus on Facebook This thesis covers developing and creating social media strategies for marketing purposes.
Despite this, the case study which was analyzed was exclusively Facebook-oriented. Due to
this, metrics for other platforms such as Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn were not
highlighted.
52
6 Conclusion This section will answer the main research question as well as the two additional ones,
presented in chapter 1.2.1. The section will then briefly cover future research areas which has
been noticed as lacking from this research.
6.1 Main research question The main research question of this thesis was “Which aspects need to be considered when
developing and maintaining a social media strategy for marketing purposes?”. The results of
this research suggest a six-stage life cycle of social media strategies specifically designed for
marketing purposes.
The first stage, referred to as the pre-assessment stage, is where business perform an analysis
of the marketing needs for the company, the relevant target audience as well as the social
media environment in accordance to the target audience at hand. While conducting this
analysis, the main business goals of the firm, the marketing goals of the firm and the internal
capacity need to be the basis of every decision made.
The second stage is called the strategy creation stage. Using the analysis from stage one, the
company should at this point have an established target audience analysis and have decided
upon which channels to use. In the second stage companies need to develop five additional
aspects of the strategy, namely long-term goals of the strategy, a content strategy including
short-term goals, a measurement framework, internal policies and lastly a crisis management
plan.
Third is the basics and hypotheses stage. This is where companies start building their presence
on social media while simultaneously trying various content strategies to get a deeper
understanding of what the target audience responds positively towards. While in this stage,
companies constantly re-iterate and adjust the measurement framework and content strategy.
The fourth stage is the maturation and capitalization stage. Once reached, the company is at a
point of constant growth and starting to reap the rewards of the efforts on social media.
Fifth is a stage called short-term evaluations, which is entered on a set frequency, such as
every two months. In this stage, companies look back at the last period and analyze which
content performed well and which did not. From this, an iteration and re-adjustment of the
content strategy to be more in line with what the consumers want should be performed.
The sixth and final stage is called long-term evaluations. This stage should also be entered of
a set frequency but at a lower frequency than the short-term evaluations. In this stage,
companies perform a new target audience analysis and social media environment analysis to
detect how the two aspects have changed, or are about to change. From this, companies may
re-adjust the fundamentals of the strategy such as channel choice.
6.2 Additional research questions The first additional research question, “Which advantages are gained by B2C companies
investing in a social media strategy for marketing purposes?”, has different answers depending
on the goal of the strategy. The different advantages which can be gained through social media
53
strategies are: stronger brand, increased sales, increased traffic to other digital assets, increased
customer basis through increased reach and lastly business and product development.
Moreover, investing in a social media strategy gives businesses an additional link to their
consumers through a medium where a clear majority of people are. Lastly, social media grants
businesses an opportunity to cost efficiently direct their message at a very specific target
audience and avoid paying for reaching others. This is done through the targeting functions
built in on the different social media platforms.
However, many of the advantages which are gained are through the nature of social media in
comparison to more traditional media, which the second additional research question, “Which
advantages are native to social media marketing which do not exist in more traditional
marketing?” provides an answer to. The results of this thesis show that social media grants
companies a two-way communication channel with their consumers. This two-way
communication creates a stronger bond and increased loyalty between the two parties while
also enabling the consumers to give direct feedback on the material. This direct consumer
feedback in turn grants businesses an alternative to test out marketing campaigns on a small
audience to determine its success before scaling it up to an additional audience – further
highlighting the cost efficiency of social media which this flexibility grants. Social media, and
most forms of digital media, also provides companies with immense amounts of data of their
clientele, such as geographical data, age or sex. Lastly, social media provides businesses with
an opportunity to turn the consumers into active co-creators of the content and brand, while
also strengthening the brand through an easier word-of-mouth reaching a larger audience than
historically.
6.3 Future research One aspect which I believe is vital to analyze deeper is how consumers following a company
on Facebook engage with their content in comparison to those who get targeted by paid reach
using Facebook’s marketing system. Are the consumers who have actively chosen to follow a
brand more inclined to engage with it, or are consumers who see the posts based on target
audience criteria just as likely to do so? This study highlights how some posts reached
audiences 7 times larger than the number of people who actively follow the brand.
Another aspect which could grant useful information to the research community is looking at
the statement made by David as presented in chapter 4.1 that even small geographical
differences such as consumers of the same target group living in Stockholm contra southern
Sweden may use the same social media platforms vastly differently. A case study of certain
target audiences of different demographics could have fascinating results.
Lastly, I would recommend analyzing aspects that may be incorporated into a social media
strategy which are not directly for marketing purposes. Other reasons which interviewees
highlighted in this study was using social media for community management and for customer
support. How can social media optimize customer support?
54
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8 Appendix 8.1 Appendix A – Interview with the client’s
account manager Opening questions about the person and her role
Tell me a bit about yourself, which background do you have and what is your current
position at Marvelous?
o What does that role entail?
o How long have you been at Marvelous?
o How long have you been working with the client?
Questions regarding the strategy What do you believe are the biggest reasons for why the client invested in the strategy
that Marvelous have developed?
What are the goals of the strategy mainly?
How was the strategy created, what was the process?
o How was the target audience analysis done?
o Why was Facebook chosen as the social media platform?
What would you say the client’s main advantages of this marketing strategy as
opposed to more traditional mediums?
Questions regarding the content strategy What is the daily work in form of content strategy?
How are the posts categorized?
o Interaction
o Feel-good
o DIY
o Products
o Dark posts
Questions regarding the evaluations How are the KPI’s and evaluations set up for these 5 different categories?
o What are their respective goals?
How does the evaluation adapt the strategy?
When you evaluate, how do you weigh in organic versus paid reach?
Do you have a standard CPM set up?
59
8.2 Appendix B – Interviews with industry
professionals Opening questions about the person and the role
Tell me about yourself, which background do you have and what is your current
position?
o What does that role entail?
o How long have you worked with social media?
Reasons for investing in a social media strategy Which reasons do you see for companies deciding that they should create a social
media strategy?
Which would you say the most common goals of a strategy is?
o Why?
o Any less common goals?
Which advantages do you see with a successfully executed strategy?
o Which advantages do they get over their competitors?
o How can you tell?
Strategy creation When companies decide they need to create a social presence, which steps need to be
considered when creating a strategy? (How is the strategy actually created in
practice?)
Which are the most common mistakes which you see companies do?
o What is often forgotten?
How broad/focused would you say a strategy can be?
o How many goals can you have?
How do you analyze the social media landscape?
Which are the most common social media platforms used in strategies?
What would you say Facebook’s purpose of existing in a strategy is?
Anything else that we have not touched upon which has to be thought of when
creating a strategy?
Advantages with social media in comparison to more traditional
media Which advantages of marketing through social media can you not find in traditional
marketing?
o How is this noticeable?
Would you say social media has changed marketing?
o How?
o Why?
Measuring the results What is important to think about when evaluating the strategy?
Which KPI’s are frequently set up, and how are they evaluated?
How does the result of the KPI’s adjust the strategy?
60
Wrap up Are there any other aspects of the subject at hand which I have not touched upon
which you feel are important?
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