Social media and the impact on marketing communication

Abstract: Since Internet usage has been increasing so much in the last 15 years, and
particularly in the last 10 years, many companies have found new
possibilities to promote their products. These new approaches are mainly
used as a communication tool and are called social media. The purpose of this
thesis has been to study how social media influence the marketing
communication of companies. The methodology behind this research, in order
to ensure a suitable and viable data collection, was personal interviews with
two manufacturing companies, one social network platform and one marketing
agency. The method was a qualitative research approach combining different
case studies in the research strategy. The diverse interview partners were
each given a specific interview guide synchronized to their field of
business and afterwards these four cases were analyzed using the data
collected from the personal interviews and the mentioned interview guides.
The overall result of this thesis was that the communication via social
media is still
in the early stages of its development. Basically companies approve social
media as an effective tool to exceed and support marketing communication.
Furthermore social media monitoring is an important component, but is still
in the early stages. Generally companies approve social media as an
effective tool to exceed and support marketing communication. Social media
still has huge growth potentials regarding the differentiation and
specification of different platforms, because not all of them are suitable
for every company.