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The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of social media marketing on new venture performance utilizing Structure-Conduct-Performance (SCP) theory.

A survey approach was employed, and questionnaires were sent out to the representatives of new ventures established in the previous six years at the time of data collection. Measures were adapted from SCP theory and the measurement model examined. A total of 248 responses were analyzed using structural equation modelling (LISREL 11).

The results indicate that social media marketing capabilities have a positive impact on the marketing performance of new ventures through a mediating effect of social media marketing performance. Thus, social media marketing performance affects new venture performance through marketing performance.

This research supports the vitality of social media in the lives of new firms and the importance of social media when executing marketing activities. The perceptive measurement of social media marketing capabilities on the firm level can be useful for new ventures to evaluate their competencies related to social media, and thus help firms improve those capabilities over time.

This research contributes to the existing knowledge on linkages between social media marketing capabilities and new venture performance acknowledging the role of a turbulent market environment. Therefore, the recognition of industry structure articulated by a turbulent market environment, social media marketing capabilities and social media support for competitive marketing strategy answers the question of how social media marketing capabilities drive competitive marketing strategy and subsequently influence performance.

Today, social media is counted as an integral part of marketing strategies, which has led to a paradigm change in this field. As reported, social media marketing has been growing over the recent five years and is predicted to be exponentially growing in the future. However, despite the huge promise and intention to adopt social media marketing strategies by organisations, there remain challenges regarding the successful implementation of these new marketing programmes. Accordingly, marketing managers’ awareness of the success factors of social media marketing is essential to return investment in this area. Due to the little research been accomplished in this field, this paper aims to identify the success factors of social networks’ marketing and to rank the factors by using of interval best-worst method (BWM).

To serve the research aims, an extant literature review is accomplished and a focus group approach is conducted to identify the main success factors and sub-factors. To analyse the focus group discussions, a qualitative content analysis approach is applied. Interval BWM is used to calculate the weights of each identified factor.

In the final framework, six main success criteria, including strategy, process, technology, content, performance evaluation and people are identified, for each sub-criteria are developed. The interval BWM results suggest the content criterion as the most important success factor in developing a social media marketing strategy.

First, this research provides a comprehensive insight into the success factors and best practices of social media marketing. This is the first to draw on the critical factors affecting the success of social media marketing, considering people in the organisation such as top management, employees and customers, strategy, process and performance evaluation focussing on the change management requirements for applying social media marketing and technology as the technical factor of the adoption process, simultaneously. Identifying critical success factors of social media marketing will help marketing managers to avoid falling into the trap of developing social media strategies based on less important areas and ignoring the critical ones. Besides, owing to the limited resources of organisations in implementing social media marketing strategies, prioritising and weighing the success factors will lead to a focus on more important areas.

Whilst the related studies have mostly concentrated on the capabilities and activities required to conduct social media marketing and the few research investigated the critical success factors most concentrated on the customer and the content-related factors, the finding of this research goes beyond that and suggests technical, process and human aspects simultaneously in the implementation process in a holistic view.

This study aims to investigate how business-to-business (B2B) companies use message strategies on social media platform and how these strategies are effective in improving customer perceived value and encouraging customer engagement, as well as how B2B companies differ from business-to-customer (B2C) counterparts in terms of utilization and effectiveness of social media message strategy.

Based on content analysis of Sina Weibo brand pages and survey of website visitors, this paper examines the differences of social media message strategies and their impacts upon customer perceived value and customer engagement between B2B and B2C companies.

B2B companies use more rational appeals and less emotional appeals, have lower degree of informativeness and perform better in interactivity and variety than B2C companies. These five dimensions of message strategy have different roles in engaging customers via perceived value across B2B and B2C settings.

The research makes significant contributions to B2B social media marketing literature by answering two interrelated questions, namely, “What companies are doing?” and “What companies should do?” on social media websites. Besides, it provides insightful implications for B2B companies on how to implement appropriate message strategies in their social media marketing efforts by conducting Importance-Performance Analysis.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a unique overview of business-to-business (B2B) companies engagement with and strategic approach to use of social media in brand building. This research complements the much more extensive knowledge base regarding social media use in business-to-consumer (B2C) contexts.

Since social media marketing is a relatively new activity for B2B companies an interpretivist stance that is inductive in nature is adopted. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with marketing professionals involved in managing social media programmes in France, Ireland, the UK and the USA.

The study found that the level of enagement with social media marketing varied, as summarised in the B2B Social Media Engagement Taxonomy. Enhancing brand image, extending brand awareness and facilitating customer engagement were the most common social media objectives. There was no evidence to suggest that companies saw social media as heralding a paradigm shift in brand management and control of the kind discussed and experienced in B2C social media contexts. The B2B social media strategy framework is proposed; this identifies the following six components of a social media strategy: monitoring and listening, empowering and enagaging employees, creating compelling content, stimulating electronic word of mouth, evaluating and selecting channels, and enhacning brand presence through integrating social media.

The research contributes to the knowledge base associated with social media marketing by offering insights into and a framework summarising B2B social media strategy.

The purpose of this study is to develop a typology of social media messages to compare the effectiveness of different message strategies.

In total, 1,837 messages from 12 hotel brand Facebook pages were content-analyzed. Applying both correspondence analysis and multivariate analysis of variance, the study compared message strategy across hotel-scale levels and explored the effectiveness of different message strategies.

A typology of four-type message format and six-type message content was developed. The picture message was the best message format. Product, brand and involvement messages were shown to be more effective than information, reward and promotion messages. Promotion message was the least effective message content type.

The major limitation of this study is the generalizability owing to the sample selection process. There is also the limitation on exclusion of control variables, selection of the three effectiveness measures and evolving social media technology.

The typology of Facebook message strategy developed in the study provided guidelines for hotel marketers to create messages on Facebook pages and track effectiveness. Hotels should also take full advantage of the picture format and product, brand and involvement contents.

This study created a new typology of social media message strategy consisting of two dimensions. It also provided empirical evidence to support the application of message strategy theory in the hotel social media marketing area.

This research aims to investigate the current patterns of social media adoption for marketing in the restoration industry and analyse the strategies used by those restoration companies that have adopted social media. Social media marketing has been proven as a cost-effective way to engage new customers, and especially useful for small businesses. The disaster “restoration industry” is the special sector of general contracting that serves both commercial and residential property owners in terms of restoring their disaster-affected property. The restoration industry is characterised by small-business domination and constant need of new customers to survive in the market. Many restoration contractors have started adopting social media for marketing. However, goals and social media marketing strategies have not yet been clearly articulated.

Data were collected through a systematic content analysis (CA) of sample restoration companies’ Facebook and Twitter posts over a 30-day study period. After a preliminary investigation of the industry, the researchers selected the Restoration Industry Association (RIA) member companies, as the research population. Sixty companies were randomly selected from the 1,165 RIA member companies, which equals to 5 per cent of the population. Reliability was tested statistically using Cohen’s Kappa.

Three levels of adoption were derived from the data: active users, non-active users and non-adopters. More than half of the sample companies were found to have adopted at least one social media channel for marketing. However, only 26 out of the 60 sample companies were active on the social media that they have adopted. Active adopters showed, on average, relatively frequent usage patterns, with 10 Facebook posts and 37 tweets in a 30-day period. Sampled restoration companies which were active social media users posted mostly announcements and educational information of Facebook and used Twitter for news and direct interaction with customers. The observed companies revealed a mix of business-relevant content and personalised content including personal greetings, sharing of photos about holidays and fun events.

Three levels of adoption were derived from the data: active users, non-active users and non-adopters. More than half of the sample companies were found to have adopted at least one social media channel for marketing. However, only 26 out of the 60 sample companies were active on the social media that they have adopted. Active adopters showed, on average, relatively frequent usage patterns, with 10 Facebook posts and 37 tweets in a 30-day period. Sampled restoration companies that were active social media users posted mostly announcements and educational information of Facebook and used Twitter for news and direct interaction with customers. The observed companies revealed a mix of business-relevant content and personalised content including personal greetings, sharing of photos about holidays and fun events.

The results showed that social media adoption has not yet penetrated the restoration industry – the adoption rate of 65 per cent is significantly lower than the 77 per cent of companies in all industries. In-depth CA of active social media users revealed patterns of engagement on Facebook and Twitter. This paper built on those patterns to emphasise strategies restoration companies can use to build interpersonal relationships and trust, which can lead to increased word-of-mouth recommendations; facilitate customer contact through a cross-linking strategy; and engage in simple methods for search engine optimisation. These strategic recommendations are grounded in existing practices and, therefore, are feasible and accessible for disaster restoration companies.

The research results showed how the construction industry, especially small businesses, has adopted social media for marketing. A snapshot of the industry’s level of social media adoption for marketing strategy can provide a useful reference point about the industry’s practices and potential future directions. This paper provides suggestions about effective social media marketing strategies. The paper also illustrates the use of CA as a promising method for research in construction management.

This paper aims to investigate what activities allow the firm to efficiently and effectively integrate social media into its strategic marketing activities.

As the current research investigates a new area of focus in the literature, an exploratory study consistent with the adoption of new technology in a firm was used to identify salient activities. In-depth interviews with those who oversee their firm’s social media strategies were conducted to discover and assess organizational activities.

Findings suggest that many firms did not adopt organizational activities important for effective social media execution, leading us to the view social media as the “step-child” of corporate functions, not receiving resources more traditional functions would receive; those responsible for the social media function, an exercise in external communications, may be hampered by poor internal communications; and few firms have defined and measured goals for social media where employees are held accountable for supporting an overall marketing strategy.

The findings point the way for future confirmatory empirical research of organizational activities, top management team support and effective internal communication in the rapid-response environment of social media. Findings also provide implications for marketing practitioners for the use and measurement of social media to achieve marketing objectives.

The current research is meaningful and unique in that it approaches social media from the organizational process perspective, which has received little attention in the social media literature.

Understanding what organizational factors enable a successful social media presence is a relevant issue for academics and practicing managers. The purpose of this investigation is to thus develop and validate a scale to measure a social media marketing system (SMMS).

This paper follows a rigorous scale development process based on three stages: item generation, measurement development and instrument testing. The validity and reliability tests were conducted using data provided by social media managers and the managers' supervisors.

The results validate a 25-item multidimensional SMMS scale that exhibits adequate internal consistency, reliability, construct validity and nomological validity. The results also show that the SMMS scale positively correlates with outcomes that are key to firm success (social media strategy success and marketing performance).

This paper conceptualizes SMMS through four dimensions, namely formalization, human resource management, co-creation and marketing planning, and the paper associates SMMS to important firm outcomes. The newly developed measurement instrument adds to the small repository of research scales relevant to social media and can serve as a springboard from which future work can understand social media from both an internal management perspective and an integrated outlook.

This study aimed to present the methodology of the text data analysis to establish marketing strategies for fintech companies in a practical way. Specifically, the methodology was presented to convert customers' review data, which consisted of the text data (unstructured data), to the numerical data (structured data) by using a text mining algorithm “Global Vectors for Word Representation,” abbreviated as “GloVe”; additionally, the authors presented the methodology to deploy the numerical data for marketing strategies with eliminate-reduce-raise-create (ERRC) value factor analytics.

First, the authors defined the background, features and contents of fintech services based on a review of related literature review. Additionally, they examined business strategies, the importance of social media for fintech services and fintech technology trends based on the literature review. Next, they analyzed the similarity between fintech-related keywords, which represent the trends in fintech services, and the text data related to fintech corporations and their services posted on Facebook and Twitter, which are two of the most popular social media globally, during the period 2017–2019. The similarity was then quantified and categorized in terms of the representative global fintech companies and the status of each fintech service sector. Furthermore, the similarity was visualized, and value elements were rebuilt using ERRC strategy analytics.

This study is meaningful in that it quantifies the degree of similarity between customers' responses, experiences and expectations regarding the rapidly growing global fintech firms' services and trends in fintech services.

This study suggests a practical way to apply in business by providing a method for transforming unstructured text data into structured numerical data it is measurable. It is expected that this study can be used as the basis for exploring sustainable development strategies for the fintech industry.

The purpose of this paper is to identify key social medial channels which pharmaceutical firms need to consider when desiring to understand consumer behavior, build, maintain and proactively manage relationships. Also, it proposes the application of analytic hierarchy process (AHP) sensitivity analysis algorithm to test the stability or robustness of the priority ranking. Specifically, this paper leverages performance sensitivity analysis to evaluate how small changes (perturbation) in the major objectives of the pharmaceutical relationship marketing (PRM) tactics within the social media environment will influence the ranking of the alternative course of actions.

This paper used AHP-based questionnaire survey to evaluate the relative importance of factors accounting for PRM and the impact of social media channels. The major objectives and the alternative strategies used were from literature reviewed. Interviews with senior managers were insightful and helpful in the wording, content and format of the questionnaire.

Customer engagement is the most important PRM tactic, followed by communication and trust. The performance sensitivity analysis carried out on the PRM tactics showed that the ranking associated with social media channel options remained robust or insensitive to small perturbations.

The data procured for this paper were based on one focal pharmaceutical firm. Convincing the same to grant an interview and late responding to the questionnaire was a great challenge.

Social media impact on pharmaceutical marketing relationship is important for pharmaceutical marketers. PRM bodes well with the social media environment. Pharmaceutical industry can build and maintain relationships with consumers through social media. Firms that leverage social media to enhance their PRM tactics will be viewed favorably in terms of trust, transparency, openness and honesty. The results provide pharmaceutical marketing managers with insightful and valuable information with respect to the role or social media impact on the PRM. The AHP model, objectives and their relative importance provide valuable information for managers on how to monitor the values that matters to customers the most.

This paper is one of the very few on the PRM and perhaps the first that examines social impact leveraging the AHP model. In addition, this paper contributes to the relationship marketing literature by leveraging a multi-criteria decision-making algorithm to prioritize the most important factors accounting for the PRM strategies.