Ways to Create and Measure e-WOM on Social Media

Abstract: Marketing is seen as a subject of high importance by companies, and the objective with marketing is commonly said to make the selling process unnecessary. As technology has evolved, a shift from traditional marketing to online marketing took place. This shift has had extreme effects on companies, forcing them to adapt their marketing strategies to include online marketing. As the increased importance of online marketing and usage of the internet has increased, so has the expression electronic Word-of-Mouth. With the uprising of e-WOM, word-of-mouth has shifted from being a one-on-one method to a one-to-many, which has increased the importance of companies to work with e-WOM. This thesis aims to examine e-WOM, how e-commerce business-to-business companies can and do create e-WOM and the measure of it. To be able to solve the problem at hand, the following two research questions have been constructed: RQ1: How can e-commerce, Small & Medium-sized Enterprises measure e-WOM on Social Media? RQ2: How is e-WOM created on Social Media by e-commerce Small & Medium-sized Enterprises? The research is performed with an inductive and qualitative approach. Multiple case-studies were used to gather empirical data, three cases were thoroughly and holistically investigated. The objective of the cases was to gain experts point of view on the topic and find one potential user. The conducted interviews showed the importance of e-WOM and marketing on Social Media, the user estimated that a positive e-WOM would lead to a 5-10% increase of the company’s total revenues. Ten specific recommendations for how to use Social Medias such as Facebook in order to create e-WOM was investigated. The interviews showed that ‘Being Active’ and ‘Choosing the right Social Media channels’ are the most important recommendations. The findings also implied that ‘Social Media Monitoring’ is the right tool to use when measuring e-WOM and that it will become just as important and widely used as Search Engine Optimization. Hopefully, those recommendations will be implemented by companies when forming their strategies for online marketing at Social Medias.