Customizing social media marketing to different social media platforms

Abstract

In the ever-changing world of social media and social media marketing, the practices of it appear to be still lacking, especially on part of Finnish brands. This resulted in hypotheses being formed, aren’t there more effi-cient ways to use social media and especially different social media platforms and their unique features and differing demography, would consumers be more likely to follow i.e., brand’s local store’s social media ac-count, or more likely to follow brand on multiple accounts if the content differed per platform. These hypoth-eses were first examined with the help of secondary data, and then tested with primary data, collected as quantitative research in the form of online questionnaire. The secondary data examines the variety and uniqueness of platforms and the differences between them, how consumers behave towards variety and social media and what other uses social media could have, than just marketing and branding. The online questionnaire received total of 51 responses, and the questions focused strongly on the same line as research questions, if people would be more likely to follow accounts on different platforms if the content varied across them, if they’d be interested in account for local stores or “off-topic” account and whether it was possible to use social media to im-prove company’s image and transparency. The results confirmed the hypotheses to be correct, showing strong interest towards more varied content and variety across platforms while confirming there are other uses for social media than just marketing and brand-ing. The results offer generally sufficient data to support further research in the topic, or even possible action already, recommending using social media accounts more efficiently, especially across different platforms.