Social Media 📱

Do Celebrities call all the shots?

Welcome back 🙂
Hope you all have been enjoying my blog posts so far.

Today’s post will discuss the influence of social media through analysing the Social Media Marketing Framework with various real-life examples.

Social Media is reshaping the marketing environment significantly. People’s fascination and interest in the private life of other’s has given rise to the increasing capacity of social media to influence every aspect of human activity. However, the management of this type of digital communication and media is often in a state of anarchy (Chaffey, D & Ellis-Chadwick 2019).

The Social Media Marketing Framework offers a holistic way to consider the strategic application of Social Media, regularly used by high-profile social media personalities.

Felix et al. (2016) proposed four dimensions to social media marketing:

1. Scope—focuses on the extent to which social media platforms are used as a one-way communications tool. To entertain and inform end-users or as a collaborative environment facilitating interactions between end-users and companies.
2. Culture—distinguishes between the use of social media as a traditional mass-marketing channel or a more modernist approach of being flexible.
3. Structure—looks at organisation and how it is deployed.
4. Governance—relates to company rules and to what extent employees are told what they can and can’t say on social media.

This framework seeks to highlight the complexities underlying the use of social media and the importance of taking a multidimensional approach towards its application and management (Chaffey, D & Ellis-Chadwick 2019).

So now let’s use the above information to analyse the company Kylie Cosmetics.

Kylie Cosmetics is an American Cosmetics Company founded by Kylie Jenner in 2015.

1. Scope
   Kylie seeks to constantly engage her audience through various social media platforms. She uses both one-way communications tools and interactive approaches to entertain, inform and promote Kylie Cosmetics. On her Kylie Cosmetics website, customers are encouraged to use the #KylieCosmetics to share photos with the products.
   
2. Culture
   Kylie has utilised the reach of digital social media to build a $400 Million cosmetics business in under two years. Kylie Cosmetics uses various social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter to share commercial information in both traditional mass-marketing channels and modernist, flexible and open approaches. The company incorporates various digital marketing formats including text, photos, videos, audio, blogs and messages. Kylie Cosmetics Instagram engagement has dramatically increased in comparison to snapchat. Causing her to cut back on her previously frequent snapchat activity- refocusing her efforts on to Instagram. It is important to observe how her core fan base is interacting with her content (Econsultancy 2019).
   
3. Structure
   Prior to creating Kylie Cosmetics, Kylie had already established her own brand with the help and financial boost from the Kardashians. Kylie uses her own face to exhibit her makeup range- most likely saving her a lot of money as no third-party endorsements are needed. Despite Kylie Cosmetics having its own social media accounts, Kylie also promotes the brand on her personal accounts as well (Econsultancy 2019).
   Kylie Cosmetics has 12 employees- all employees have different roles with significant importance on the promotion and marketing side of the business. The structure is one of centralised control and clearly defined protocols with clear roles for example, social media and marketing manager and content creator.
   
4. Governance
   Kylie owns 100% stake of Kylie Cosmetics. Employees are under contracts to keep new products, concepts and ideas private. There are release dates for products and dates decided for when new product releases can be talked about etc.

Social Media & Financial Industries

To analyse the Social Media Marketing Framework a bit further, I have interpreted what is happening within the financial services industry in relation to its use of social media.

The financial services industry is generally averse to risk, meaning social media represented a major threat. As a result, many banks, building societies and financial institutions avoided being represented on social media platforms (Chaffey, D & Ellis-Chadwick 2019). This caused an issue with customers who increasingly demanded real-time responses from the companies and service providers. This shows how the scope and culture of a company or financial institution is important. Nowadays with the access and saturation of social media, communication between consumers and businesses is often instant and, in some cases, can be available 24/7. Therefore, the financial services industry had to start investing in financial technology. This resulted in not only faster and improved services but also widespread the use of social media (Chaffey, D & Ellis-Chadwick 2019). In terms of the structure, Facebook, Twitter and other platforms are used in a controlled way and as a channel that facilitates customer interaction, improved targeting and niche market expansion. It helps to create a delivery channel for new products and exploring new business models.

Although there are numerous positive impacts social media has on the financial services industry, it is also possibly the biggest threat of all. By embracing social media, financial services have granted ‘customer mindshare’ to Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft while paving the way for non-banks to replace the traditional long-standing firms.

Thanks for reading today’s post. Hope you enjoyed 😊

References:
Chaffey, D & Ellis-Chadwick, F 2019, Digital Marketing; strategy, implementation and practice, 7^th edn, Pearson, United Kingdom

Felix, R, Rauschnabel, P, Hinsch, C 2016, ‘ Elements of strategic social media marketing’, Journal Of Business Research, USA, viewed 27 August 2019, http://isiarticles.com/bundles/Article/pre/pdf/85175.pdf

Hillier, K 2019, ‘Behind Kylie Jenner’s success’, Econsultancy, 11 March, viewed 27 August 2019, https://econsultancy.com/behind-kylie-jenner-s-success-in-a-saturated-cosmetics-industry/