Evaluation of the most common social media marketing practices

Abstract

The idea for this thesis comes from personally experiencing working with social media marketing and noticing that it can be confusing, hard to understand and time-consuming when not getting the results one aiming for and it can be hard to know where to begin. For a small company the presence on social media can enhance the sales and have a positive effect on the revenue, therefore it is important to have a basic knowledge of how social media works and have an understanding of the importance to have a social media marketing plan.

The aim of this thesis is to help small to medium-sized business owners that wants to increase their appearance on the social media platforms and grow their audience, to navigate through different practices on what to do, provide tools that can be used in the process and what might not give the results they are aiming for.

The thesis is divided into five parts, first the introduction, then the methods used, third is the qualitative interviews that have been conducted with three professionals that work with social media marketing and the fourth part is the diary-based part that has been done and documented during seven weeks working for a case company and then last is the conclusions and results.

In this thesis it is brought up multiple times that some of the most important steps is the groundwork before starting to work on the company’s social media is to have a well-grounded marketing plan, target audience and target market to then start to evaluate which social media platforms to focus on.