Social Media Advertising Advantages of Dissertation

Keeping a diverse yet well-focused identity across social media platforms yet tactically choosing those platforms that are of true resource advantage to enterprises is again a complex and continuous process, but one that is vital to modern businesses.

Despite the recognized importance of social media marketing and the known difficulties of establishing how to effectively engage in these efforts, many businesses do not even attempt to gauge the effects of their social media marketing efforts (Michaelidou et al., 2011). According to Michaelidou et al. (2011), most SMEs utilizing social media marketing techniques are hoping to increase their numbers of new customers, which is a concrete goal that can be more accurately assessed and even individually tracked (individually both by instance of marketing and by individual consumers) via much social media and can therefore be more accurately measured and assessed than many other social media marketing efforts and goals (Michaelidou et al., 2011). Despite this, many of these companies fail to actually incorporate any metrics measuring, and this has led to an increased reliance on potentially ineffective and inefficient marketing techniques that present a drain on resources and a lack of identification of other more effective social media marketing strategies (Michaelidou et al., 2011). Tactics for such measurement are available and the measuerment itself can be carried out by a number of third-party vendors specializing in such tracking, making it all the more urgent for SMEs to begin a more accurate and effective use of social media marketing if they are to remain/become more competitive (Michaelidou et al., 2011).

The intersection between social media and viral marketing is also of key importance in understanding marketing in the modern era for enterprises of any size; the ability to reach many millions of consumers with a single marketing or advertising instance does not only exist for primetime television and the Super Bowl, any more, but predicting how to take a marketing campaign truly "viral" is all but impossible (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2011). Viral marketing has existed as a concept since the mid-1990s, but only in the past decade and the rise of "Web 2.0" has viral marketing reached its true potential through user sharing on social media sites, where the ability for a marketing message to spread in a truly viral manner -- each new viewer passing the message on to many others resulting in an exponential growth in the number of viewers over a very short period of time -- is a reality for most of the developed world (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2011). This creates many "outside-the-box" marketing opportunities for creative businesses, and yet is also further cause for wariness in resource allocation and can be ineffective if improperly managed and for a variety of other reasons that remain unclear and under-examined in research and practice (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2011)

SMEs have begun to utilize social media marketing more and more extensively, but not necessarily with more substantial effects. The literature shows a significant gap in the knowledge and practice of effective social media marketing techniques amongst all enterprises and researchers. The additional resource gap that SMEs must contend with puts them at a more significant disadvantage and makes…