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The purpose of this paper is to explore the key role of WhatsApp as WhatsApp-customer relationship management (w-CRM) for strengthening the relationship in the education sector. The paper is exploratory in nature.

A self-administered questionnaire was developed with 20 items for four latent constructs. The data were collected from the undergraduate and postgraduate students of Sri Sri University, Cuttack (Odisha), India, based on convenience sampling. The hypotheses were tested through regression and correlation analyzes.

The findings of the study unveiled that the relationships between students and teaching staff, students and non-teaching staff, and teaching and non-teaching staff can be strengthened by the adoption of w-CRM.

WhatsApp can be an inevitable tool to emerge with traditional CRM system to facilitating the advance implementation of w-CRM in the service industry.

Although the present study is limited to one of the service sectors, i.e. education, it unfolds the scope of implementation of w-CRM in different services. Especially, small and medium enterprises can implement this tool hand to hand to maintain strong relationships with customers.

The aim of this research is to identify the characteristics that give rise to motivations to use social apps in light of behavioral concepts related to consumers’ desires and emotional values.

Netnography is used as the main methodology to analyze and categorize user profiles of online social networks. These profiles are presented through conceptual headlines, which highlight the main characteristics of each user group.

The results of the study show that many users have become dependent on the WhatsApp application, either for technological reasons or for social reasons related to fashion and status.

Few consumers actually explained the ways they use mobile social networks in the context of the procedures and level of communication performed. However, the influence of social contexts in the consumer environment is changing perceived values focusing on prestige and status to technological elements that the majority of consumers use.

Practical implications are directly related to forming business connections in a less formal and more hedonic environment, improving market results while fostering user enjoyment. In addition, the ongoing updates to WhatsApp have brought new functionalities and improvements to previously weak features.

Although other applications offer means by which to talk and send messages, WhatsApp continues to be (as of early 2021) the most used platform for conversation in Brazil. The sovereignty of WhatsApp is directly linked to its social value, which is related to the number of consumers who daily interact via the network.

The use of mobile messaging (MM) or mobile instant messaging has grown in the past few years at astonishing rates.

This growth has prompted data gatherers and trend forecasters to look at the use of MM apps in different ways than in the past.

In a 2015 survey, The Pew Research Center asked about the use of MM apps separately from cell phone texting for the first time (Duggan, 2015).

Digital marketing site eMarketer.com published their first ever worldwide forecast for MM in 2015. This forecast report shows 1.4 billion current users of MM apps or 5 per cent of smartphone users accessing an MM app at least once a month. This is a 31.6 per cent increase from the previous year. The forecast predicts that by 2018, there will be two billion users, representing 80 per cent of smartphone users (eMarketer.com, 2015).

The purpose of this paper is to examine the strategic use of social media and chat applications of women entrepreneurs to promote their businesses.

Because of the nature of the study and dearth of sufficient data in the Middle Eastern society on the women entrepreneurship, this study employed a qualitative research methodology. The research comprised of 20 in-depth interviews with immigrant women entrepreneurs in the United Arab Emirates. They were identified through personal contacts and referrals.

All the expatriate women interviewed are using social media and chat applications to promote their business. Facebook is used for brand creation and WhatsApp is used as a direct marketing tool to evoke purchase response. Though traditional promotional tools are far from redundant, their role is more supplementary. The increasing trend is a combination of traditional tools and digital tools. Digital tools seem to have an upper hand in their business promotions.

This study is limited to SME sector in one industry and in one country. The qualitative nature of this study could affect the generalizability of the results. A more extensive study is needed and future research should be more diverse including widening the selection of respondents, industries and countries.

This study is a novel attempt to gauge an in-depth understanding of modern communication tools. It looks specifically at the integrative strategies pursued by the immigrant women entrepreneurs using Facebook and WhatsApp.

This paper aims to investigate the mechanisms through which social media news consumption across different platforms leads to opinion polarization in society. To this end, the authors draw from cultivation theory to examine whether social media news consumption imparts a mainstreaming or resonance effect. Media consumption imparts a mainstreaming effect if frequent users, regardless of their social identity, develop homogenous attitudes about issues, whereas resonance is at play if there is a differing cultivation effect on various social groups depending on their relatability of life experiences.

The authors conduct the study in the developing context of India, using a population survey dataset from 2019. Regression-based mediation and moderation analyses were carried out to test the hypotheses.

The findings reveal that resonance is the most prominent mechanism through which social media news consumption cultivates opinion polarization, contrary to the mainstreaming effect imparted by television. Further, WhatsApp use was found to strengthen the polarizing effect of overall social media news consumption, while YouTube use weakened the cultivation of polarization.

The paper unearths how social media news consumption influences the opinion polarization of various social groups differently. The authors also find the differential effect of specific platform use. These findings have the potential to inform policymakers and developers about how to mitigate the detrimental effects of platform-based political persuasion.

This study offers significant contributions. First, the authors explain social media-induced polarization using the novel theoretical lens of cultivation. Second, the authors find that social media and television news consumption differ in their polarizing effects. Third, the authors find that while WhatsApp use amplifies the polarizing effect of social media news consumption, YouTube use weakens it.

This study aimed to determine the impact of telemedicine with WhatsApp on adherence to treatment plans amongst patients who have experienced oral and maxillofacial surgeries like implants, wisdom tooth removal, facial trauma and facial reconstruction.

The researchers used a descriptive survey research design and sampled a total of 294 patients in Nigeria who experienced oral and maxillofacial surgeries 6 months before the study and provided responses that were used for analysis. The questionnaire was used as the instrument for data collection.

The researchers found that telemedicine for counselling after oral and maxillofacial surgeries have a significant relationship with adherence to the treatment plan. The analysis revealed a significant interactive effect of telemedicine competence F(3,290) 11.423, p = 001 ? p2 = 0.038. The more skilful patients are at telemedicine, the more likely they are to engage in it and vice versa. The participants also preferred a combination of live and recorded interaction forms. It was also found that a combination of different message forms, like audio, text and video, predicts satisfaction with telemedicine.

This study has shown that social media are now playing important roles in health care delivery to patients, and this may continue to expand as societies evolve.

The purpose of the study is to investigate the use of social media platforms in teaching/learning in the period of lockdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic in Nigeria.

The study adopted a survey method and an online questionnaire was designed using SurveyMonkey for data collection from students in the Department of Library and Information Science (LIS) in some universities in Nigeria. In total, 1,290 students and five lecturers participated in the survey from five universities in Nigeria. To supplement the data from the questionnaire, the five LIS lecturers were engaged in an interview.

The study found that Zoom and WhatsApp were used by the lecturers to deliver lectures to their students. Lecturers are always available, the opportunity to store lectures and files for re-use at convenience, allows for collaborative learning, sharing learning materials, freedom in asking lecturer questions and conducive learning at home were mentioned as some of the benefits of receiving an online lecture. Some challenges associated with electronic teaching and learning were also identified. The LIS lecturers interviewed mentioned some benefits and challenges of engaging in electronic teaching during the period of lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic in Nigeria.

The research offered educators an additional method for teaching and learning in situations where physical contacts are not possible. Because electronic learning platforms are free and can be used at liberty, they require self-discipline and more responsibility from students and lecturers, which might be a challenge. It requires lecturers to generate new skills, be cognitively sensitive and well-sequenced.

Teacher/students relationship can be improved significantly with the use of social media platforms for teaching and learning.

The study reported the use of social media platforms such as WhatsApp, Zoom in the teaching/learning process in the university system in a developing country context.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of reciprocity in privacy settings on the compromises and losses in utility encountered by users. The authors base our study on WhatsApp because of the inherent reciprocity in its privacy settings to understand users’ preferences and reasoning in choosing a particular setting in light of its reciprocal consequence.

The authors present a qualitative study whereby we conducted a series of in-depth interviews with 15 individuals, representing a range of ages, nationalities, work experience and WhatsApp usage frequency. The interviews were semi-structured and thematic analysis was employed.

The results showed that reciprocity has a strong influence on privacy choices, and users over time adjusted their settings continuously in various ways to balance the overall utility of the application and their privacy. Type of contacts, usage frequency and underlying intent in using the application significantly impact privacy choices.

The findings recommend improved design for Mobile Instant Messaging that enables flexible privacy configurations that can be controlled separately for different groups and for individual contacts.

The paper provides original insights into how reciprocity affects the utility of the application and the privacy choices of the users. The investigation is unique in that the authors know of no other study that looked into the notion of reciprocity and how it affects users’ privacy choices and preferences when built in to Mobile Instant Messaging applications. Overall, the authors believe that this paper adds significantly to a growing body of research on privacy and social media.

Many studies have examined the use of social media by either customers or firms, especially in developed markets. However, little is known about why young individual entrepreneurs use digital channels (DCs) as business platforms in emerging markets (EMs) and how they integrate them into their marketing activities. This paper aims to try filling this gap.

Given the exploratory nature of this research, the authors employ a qualitative approach based on a focus group (12 participants) and semi-structured interviews (8 participants) with young entrepreneurs in Saudi Arabia. The authors adopted a deductive thematic analysis based on pre-determined theoretical frameworks to analyse and interpret the data.

The authors found that the young entrepreneurs mainly used Instagram, Snapchat and, to a moderate extent, YouTube as digital marketing channels for advertising purposes. However, they used WhatsApp for establishing direct contact and personalising communication with customers. The entrepreneurs used these channels because they are useful, easy to use, cost-effective, fun and widely used by local customers. The authors also found that the entrepreneurs used social media and offline channels conjointly in three main marketing activities (communication/promotion, transactions and customer service) to boost the customer purchasing process. The complementarity of social media and offline channels was found to improve brand visibility, enlarge markets and strengthen the customer relationship. However, the achievement of these benefits varied across small firms depending on the entrepreneurs' abilities in coordinating multiple channels and according to the distinctiveness of their businesses.

This study contributes to the entrepreneurial literature by extending the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) to explain the motives behind the use of DCs amongst individual entrepreneurs. Furthermore, this paper proposes a novel theoretical framework for studying the interaction between online and offline marketing channels during the purchasing process. Through this framework, the study provides new insights into channel coordination and multi-channel customer behaviours from the entrepreneur's perspective.

This study helps understand why small firms use different DCs. Likewise, it shows how young entrepreneurs coordinate online/offline channels in a complementary manner. The findings could also help in designing appropriate programmes encouraging young entrepreneurs to use online channels and social media to enhance their business activities.

This study offers a novel attempt at explaining the use of DCs and their interaction with traditional channels from the entrepreneur's perspective and brings new insights to why and how young entrepreneurs use DCs in an emerging market.