However, there is no profound theoretical materials about how to create a successful promotional campaign for small and medium-sized enterprises. Thus, the purpose of this work is to study how to create a promotional campaign for small businesses in social media, launch it and evaluate the result.
The main research question: How to create and launch effective promotional campaign?
Which key elements have to be considered in creating promotional campaign?
1.2 Structure
The thesis consists of introduction, conceptual foundations, research methodology, comparison of results, discussion and conclusion. Theoretical part of the project includes social media definitions, where various explanations of social media over the past years are discussed. The next chapter is connected with types of social media such as “collaborative projects”, “blogs and microblogs”, “content communities”, “social networking sites” and “virtual social words”, were the mean of each type is presented. In addition, the most popular platforms with their official statistics in Finland and all over the World are identified.
The next paragraph of conceptual foundation discusses the Theory of Media Richness (MRT) created by Richard Daft and Robert Lengel in 1986. It is a communication theory that explains the relationship between the content of a transmitted message and the means of communication through which the message is transmitted. According to the Media Richness Theory, the relationship is directly proportional, that means – the more important and complex for understanding and interpretation the transmitted message the richer in its capabilities should be the chosen means of communication (Daft & Lengel 1986). In other words, the theory indicates
“the richer the media is (more interactive - better) the richer the communication and better results in consumer-company relations” (Daft, Lengel & Trevino 1987).
Furthermore, conceptual foundation introduces the use of social media within small organizations and discusses why companies use social media in their organizations. Besides, the next part will be concentrated on the marketing communications model called “Hierarchy
of Effects” created by Elmo Lewis in 1898, which represents the series of steps that “affect the customer’s decision to purchase a product/service”. For this reason, those steps are significant for marketers as “moving through until the end of the last stage”. In order to obtain effective social media advertisement each company has to be prepared for an activity in advance. The chapter also suggests different ways to create an effective promotional campaign in social media, for instanse, “Media planning” by Sissors J. and Baron R. (2010) is presented as one of the useful guides. Different successful campaigns in Facebook and Instagram are presented as an example as well. At the end of the chapter various opportunities to analyze if there is any effect from the promotional campaign on the firm are revealed.
The main research method of the thesis is an action research. This type of thesis research is a study where the main goal is not to gain new knowledge, confirm hypotheses or collect empirical facts, but the idea is to solve practical problems related to improving the situation in a particular organization, school, college and family. (Wadsworth 1998). The research method has to be an action research as the main idea is to create promotional campaign, launch it on Facebook, wait for a result, analyze and compare with previous campaign launched in October 2017.
This study is significant as it explains the nature and background of the social media and provide readers with done definitions. Also, it shows already prepared analysis of the best social media platforms worldwide and in Finland, so that people can understand where they have to launch their pages and campaigns. In additions, the most important data shows how to create advertisement, which key aspects have to be considered and provides examples of successful advertisements on Facebook and Instagram, which motivate people to move further and replace their fears. Besides, there are useful information connected with the analysis of results, through which people can easily analyze their results from the campaign and identify the difference before the campaign and after launching it. Finally, the real example of Silver Beauty will show how promotional campaign works in accordance to the theory presented in the thesis and motivate people to create the same promotions for company’s development.
2 CONCEPTUAL FOUNDATION 2.1 Social media definitions
In the modern world, social media is one of the most useful tool for advertising businesses, through which you can increase “brand awareness, share news with customers, find a new audience and achieve customer loyalty” (Kaplan & Haenlein 2010).
The definition of social media is at the stage of growth of its popularity among scientists and researchers. Due to the lack of open and competent information about social media on the Internet, different articles usually a false nature of understanding the term “social media”.
However there many definitions of social media recently presented in journals, web pages and articles.
According to the book Marketing with social media by Linda Coles (2014), the term “social media” could be divided into two words such as “social” - it is a being social and “media”, because it is published on the internet. In other words, it is a simple web platform for conversations which is located online and gives access to communicate with different people at once.
Nowadays, the “new” social media serves as a “general stage” for people all over the world to
“relate with one another” and propose different experiences determined with activities, issues and products (Heinrichs & Lim 2012). Another definition of social media states that these
“internet based applications” are made in accordance to “ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0”, where the exchange and creation of information is acceptable. (Kaplan
& Haenlein 2010). The next author mentioned that “social media is dealing with online resources that people use to share content: video, photos, images, text, ideas, insight, humor, opinion, gossip, news” (Drury 2008). Thus, the authors also confirm that social media is a tool that unite people, make communication and information exchange easier.
Nowadays, the World has become technology-based where social media exists as a market or place for trading companies’ campaigns to a larger amount of consumers. For example, one author of the journal determines social media as a “connection between brands and customers”, which proposes “personal channel and currency” for people using social media platforms (Chi 2011). In addition, Dykeman has underlined that social media simply means to: “publish digital,
creative content; provide and obtain real-time feedback via online discussions, commentary and evaluations; and incorporate changes or corrections to the original content” (2008). Therefore, social media could be represented as a marketing tool for businesses, which serves as a place for consumers to observe, research and analyze needed product/service, compare with others and choose the best.
Finally, it is obvious that social media has two important directions inside definitions. The first one is a communication with friends, family and new people. The second one is a business that includes sellers’ goals such as to get reputation, new customers, partners, sell the product or service and buyer’s goals, for instance, to find suitable product with high quality, observe different service and compare them and buy the product or use services.
2.2 Types of social media
There are no professionally established classifications of social media accepted by the international community due to the fact that every year there are more new interactive Internet platforms open unexpected sides of social media, thus the mean and use of social media is changing over time. There are various types of social media existing at the moment, however, the most common and widely used types are published by Kaplan and Haenlein. According to the scientific journal there are six different types of social media such as “collaborative projects, blogs and microblogs, content communities, virtual game worlds and virtual social worlds”
(2010).
2.2.1 Collaborative projects
Collaborative projects are those websites where users can add additional information, delete unnecessary materials and change texts, media content and social bookmarks. The main example of the collaborative projects is Wikipedia. The idea of such project is to create a content with joint effort of different people in order to get better quality of information (Fama 1970). Companies have to know that collaborative projects strive to be the major source of information for a larger part of consumers. Authors of the article motioned that part of information that has written in Wikipedia does not inspire confidence, however day by the day the amount of people who are using Wikipedia is enlarging. For example, Nokia uses Wikipedia to change the number of employees, because the amount is changing over the time (Kaplan &
Haenlein 2010).
2.2.2 Blog and Microblogs
Blogs and Microblog are web tools where users “create and publish text-media content”. The most popular platforms are following: Twitter, Medium, Tumblr, Live journal and Blogger.
Kaplan and Haenlein have underlined that this type of the social media is the earliest. The main idea of them is to upload own messages or notes to the page in a chronological order, where the time is presented automatically. Moreover, blogs are represented by various personal diaries describing the life of the author, travels, the writer's experiences and etc. Blogs give an opportunity to communicate with other people and usually managed and controlled by one person. For instance, Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems and General Motors have own personal blogs to increase the transparency of their organizations (2010).
2.2.3 Content communities
This type of social media provides people with possibilities for sharing different content such as photos and videos with others. There are popular examples: Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, Vine, Snapchat, Twitch. The main idea of the community is to exchange different types of media, where text is presented as well. For instance, in “Book Crossing” people from over the World exchange their books; photo exchange is available on Flickr; YouTube serves as a major port of video exchange. There communities are popular due to the ease of use: there is no need to create own profile, or if there is, then only simple information such as date and number of shared videos is requested. By using these platforms people can face several problems due to copyright materials. For instance, if the company upload the video to the YouTube with the song made by Rihanna for background, the account of video provider could be banned and removed from the page because of copyrights. In this case, if the firm wants to use this song exclusively, the person, who uploaded the video, has to buy rights from the Rihanna brand to upload it (Kaplan
& Haenlein 2010).
2.2.4 Social networking sites
Social networks are certain applications that allow users to connect with large amount of friends and family members by creating own profile. One of the most famous social networking site is Facebook. When the profile or account is created, then person is able to invite friends and colleagues to get a permission for own profile observation, send messages, audio files, video, documents as well as e-books. The profile usually includes information about sex, age,
relationship status, education, work, interests, preferred music, videos, films and so on. At the present time, social networks are the most useful and interesting way to promote service or products as there are presenting a lot of people (Kaplan & Haenlein 2010).
2.2.5 Virtual game worlds and virtual social worlds
The last two types of social media are virtual game worlds and virtual social world. Virtual social world is more similar to the real life because participants are able to choose own behavior in the virtual world. The virtual social world is presented as a three-dimensional social environment, where all different users are interacting with each other’s. Author of the article also underline that there are no rules that are limiting possible interactions that allows unlimited range of self-representation and real life behaviors. The most popular example of virtual social world is a Second life application that is founded by Linden Research Inc. The application not only reflects a real life but also create a content (for instance, create details of furniture, cosmetics and jewelry) and sell the content using Linden Dollars (the virtual currency traded against the US dollar). Therefore, virtual social worlds propose different opportunities for firms engaged in marketing activities as well as human resources and internal processes management according to Kaplan and Heinlein (2010).
2.3 The most popular social media platforms worldwide and in Finland
2.3.1 The most popular SM platforms worldwide
As the services of social media become more and more popular, there are a lot of social networks where people create business connections, collaborate in projects, communicate with new people/colleagues/friends, share own ideas photos videos, review or choose appropriate product or service, use bookmarks, virtual social gaming. Statistics used in the paragraph were taken from the official statistical portal Statista, where information is already uploaded in 2018. Some of the most popular social networking service are presented below.
The general statistics presented below shows the most popular social media platforms worldwide in January 20018, the variable are ranked in accordance of active users, where the users’ amounts are presented in millions euro. Therefore, in accordance to FIGURE 1, the most famous social network worldwide is Facebook, the number of active users is more than 2.1 billion. The second place is going to YouTube as the number of active users is over 1.5 billion.
The third, fourth, fifth and sixth places are platforms for message exchanges and calls such as
WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat and QQ, where number of users is varying between 1.3 billions and 843 million. The next place goes to Instagram and there are more than 800 million active users in January 2018.
FIGURE 1. Most famous social network sites worldwide as of January 2018, ranked by number of active users (in millions). (Statista 2018)
As WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat and QQ are services primarily based on message exchange, we are not take them into account. Thus, Facebook, Youtube and Instagram will be considered as the most popular platforms.
2.3.1.1 Facebook
IMAGE 1. Facebook logo (Facebook 2018)
Facebook is a social media and social networking service that is located in USA. The website was launched in February 4, 2014 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard college students.
The clear definition of Facebook was created by Palmer and Koeing-Lewis, where social media means “a site which gives users opportunity to create their own profile with the additional option of displaying their friends’ personalities as well as sharing documents, pictures” (2009).
Moreover, Coulter and Roggeveen, underline in Management Research Review (2012) that “by
publishing own information in Facebook, sharing ideas with others and receiving materials about other peoples’ lives, serves as a result of a form of collaboration that generate new content”. Therefore, the main idea of Facebook is exchange of information, where people can create own profiles with photos and information about yourself, invite own friends, meet new people, change status, leave messages on own and others' walls, upload photos and videos, create various groups (for instance, different communities of interest).
In recent years, Facebook has acquired additional value for society. Thus, Facebook is an advertising tool through which companies promote own product or service: a lot of people have a Facebook account in order to do a business, easily get to the people by spreading messages, creating contacts with consumers and building new connection (Lutze 2010). Therefore, Facebook also serves as a business tool, due to the large amount of people using this service, good quality service or product can success there. For instance, if the service is of high quality, people write review of it on the business’ page, then others can observe and also use the service.
Other opportunities of Facebook advertisements for business are revealed in next paragraph about advertising in social media.
According to the journal of social sciences and Humanities written by Uchechi Cynthia Ohajionu and Soney Mathews (2015) the total amount of worldwide users in 2013 is one billion people. However, at the present time the general statistics shows that there are over two billion monthly active users in Facebook worldwide in the fourth quarter of the 2017 and this number is rapidly growing as in 2008 the number was 100 millions users (Statista 2017).
FIGURE 2. Number of monthly active Facebook users worldwide as of 4th quarter 2017 (in millions) (Statista 2018).
Therefore, Facebook serves as one of the most popular social media tool and according to the research tables above there is a high involvement of the people and the number of participants is very high worldwide. Thus, the platform is suitable for business advertisement and has different opportunities for development.
2.4 Social media in Finland
According to the official webpage Statistics Finland (2017) enterprises in Finland use social media actively and number of users is increasing over the time. There is a high percentage difference from 2013 to 2017 years. For example, in 2013 the percentage of social media usage by enterprises in Finland was 38% and it is significantly grown up by 25% in 2017. Moreover, investigations show that small and medium sized enterprises use social media in 58% and companies with more than one hundred employees use social media in 86%. In addition, authors underlined that the percentage may vary across different sphere of businesses.
2.4.2 The most popular platforms in Finland
The share of Finnish social media users in 2016 (Statista 2018) shows different situation in comparison with worldwide outcomes from 2018. For example, the figure below presents that
among young people the most popular is WhatsApp and it used by 88% of respondents, the next social media is YouTube and 85% people are using it. The third place in the scale of popularity in Finland is Facebook and 81% of respondents are actively use it. The next place has Instagram and the percentage of users is 72.
FIGURE 3. User share of the most popular social media services among young people in Finland in 2016 (Statista 2018)
As the WhatsApp is primarily based on message exchange we do not take it into account.
Therefore, the most popular social media in Finland are Youtube, Facebook and Instagram.
The next research, conducted in 2017, represents the share of Facebook and Facebook Messenger in Finland in terms of usage frequency. The FIGURE 6. shows that 44% of respondents use these platforms at least several times a day, while only 18% do not use the service at all.
FIIGURE 4. How often do you use Facebook and Facebook Messenger? (Statista 2018) According to the official statistics Statista (2017), the share of Instagram users in Finland 2017 was gained through the survey where 1005 people in the age of 15 to 74 years have participated.
The percentage of usage varies across the ages, however, the final result shows that 54% do not use Instagram at all, and only 14% of respondents use the platform several times a day
2.4.1 Comparison of statistics’ results
Statistics presented below show that the most popular social media worldwide is Facebook, YouTube and the Instagram in accordance to the general share of usage. The results from the
Statistics presented below show that the most popular social media worldwide is Facebook, YouTube and the Instagram in accordance to the general share of usage. The results from the