The Social Media Identity : An exploratory study on how Swedish companies conducts marketing on international social media

Abstract: The world today has successively been shrinking in terms of distance between us as individuals, globalisation and the increased digitalisation of our society have made information accessible and connectivity simpler and more profound. In conjunction with digitalising our lives, a new medium within the digital world has risen to such prominence that it is now a factor of constant influence upon us and our environment, social media. As a consequence, people have to a large extent become digital natives. This has led to firms and brands sensing opportunities within the medium and the utilisation of its different unique vehicles. In combination with practitioners increased interest and utilisation of social media from a business standpoint, business and marketing researchers have conducted increasing amounts of research on the area. Subsequently, the researchers of this paper identified the need for an increased understanding of social media marketing strategies, as further highlighted by other researchers in previous studies on the field of social media marketing. Thus, the purpose to contribute to an increased understanding of social media marketing and how this international medium, with its unique features and possibilities, could be used as a marketing tool by companies in their respective industry and market was formulated.  To provide the profound understanding stated, due to the complex nature of the matter at hand, an abductive approach was used and motivated for. The theories and concepts used for formulation of the questions in the operationalisation, for the semi-structured interviews, was presented from a broad to narrow structure under the literature review. Furthermore, the theories were summarised in the conceptual framework. The following analysis categorised and positioned the informants and their respective firms under four sub-concepts of the main concept of social media marketing strategies. These categorisations laid the foundation for the conclusion of the paper and the answering of the posed research question. The final chapter then concludes by stating the researcher’s recommendations and the presentation of an example of a possible model for the stages of utilising social media to its fullest extent. Finally, limitations and avenues for future research topics are presented and concludes the paper. The paper provides an increased and profound understanding of how four Swedish firms, in different sectors, utilise the same tool for digital marketing. We suggest that all firms active on social media for marketing purposes, should aim to adapt their marketing towards the full utilisation of all its features and possibilities. Furthermore, a process of adapting traditional marketing to the new form of social media marketing, utilising the mediums unique features and possibilities are subsequently discussed. A possible future model to describe this adaptation process are presented and further elaborated upon as one avenue for future research.