According to Rapp et al (2013) businesses nowadays make use
of Social Media more and more to reach their current and potential customers. More than 93% of B2B marketers use one or
more social media forms to communicate with their customers.
The media is used to promote their products online, but also to
interact with the audience. It’s a very easy and economical way
to promote the product or service that is offered by the business
(Rapp, Beitelspacher, Grewal, & Hughes, 2013).
It is clear that customers are the primary rocks of Social Media.
Social Media can then be interpreted as the technological
source of communication, where transactions, promotions
of products and information are exchanged. Fundamentally,
according to Wiguo & Gordon (2014), Social Media has to be
monitored as an accurate strategic action, and it cannot be left
on its own. It needs to be managed because of the explosion in
the number of Social Media sites and volume of users that are
active on them. Monitoring on its own is not enough to provide
a complete overview of how the business is doing (Weiguo &
Gordon, 2014).
26
Marketing For The Future
Incorporating Social Media
According to Alfaro & Watson-Manheim (2015), Social Media
is defined as a new information technology being adopted
by organizations to create value (Alfaro & Watson-Manheim,
2015).
Hajli (2014) maintained that Improvements in the Internet
in the past few years have made new systems available to
business: social media such as online communities, bloggers and more. Any of this was available for everyone and
this gave people the chance to make use of social media
from Facebook, Twitter, and E-mail without having physical
interaction (Hajli, 2014).
Nowadays consumers have access to different sources of
information and experiences, which have been facilitated
by other customers’ information and recommendations.
According to Mount & Martinez (2014) the use of social
media to interact with others has tremendously expanded
in the past few years. A study showed that that 88.2% of
European and U.S. firms had begun to undertake social