Use of Social Media as a Business Strategy

Abstract: The map of relationships between individuals has changed in the last 50 years due to the new emerging Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). This social change has affected organizations’ business processes. The new ICT along with social media have revolutionized the way people communicate. Firms are becoming aware of this fact and have started to figure out how to introduce these new technologies into their business strategies and management models. The purpose of this thesis is to gain a better understanding of how Facebook is being used in a business context. To reach this purpose two, specific research questions are stated: How can the use of Facebook by companies be described? How can the use of Facebook by customers be described? Based on these research questions, a literature review of previous, relevant studies was performed, ending in a conceptual framework to guide this study’s data collection. A qualitative, case study methodology was used, with participant observation and content analysis as the data collection tools on the cases of two competing brands currently using Facebook as a social media to connect to their customers: Coca Cola and Pepsi. It was found that fan pages are used by brands as an innovative, bidirectional, memory channel from which to reach their customers by using different but complementary strategies. In contrast, customers exhibited behaviours and usages of brands’ fan pages which resemble to that exhibited on their social interactions on the platform.