The different uses of social media in e-marketing

Abstract

The popularity of social media is getting bigger and bigger. Social media became an important element of the marketing mix these days. Executives as well as managers are trying to identify the uses of social media in electronic marketing and how these media can serve their business in the best possible way. A lot of scholars have found that social media can affect business in a general way and also in achieving specific objectives. Our research took these things one step further and is based on case studies we took from international well-known cases and from Middle East cases . We used two ways to compare these international cases and Middle East cases. First we compared the features of these social media campaigns with the scholars' ideas and we found that social media really help companies and people to change political situations , to engage with customers , to create traffic on media , to get more known and that they affect the sales. Secondly we compared the social media campaigns described in terms of media usage based on two major criteria: the stage in the consumption process and the type of information spread through social media . We found that most of the information used on social media was emotional in nature. None of the campaigns used only rational information, but some did use a combination of both types of information. The rational information itself was mostly of a secondary nature. Finally we drew a model of social media used according to the two criteria we have used in our analysis.