Affordances of Business Pages on Social Networking Sites: Towards an Integration Model

Affordances of Business Pages on Social Networking Sites: Towards an Integration Model

Atia Bano Memon, Kyrill Meyer
Copyright: © 2020 |Pages: 21
DOI: 10.4018/IJSMOC.2020070102
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Abstract

This paper initially undertakes a comparative analysis of business page architecture of different SNSs by employing a desktop-based research approach consisting of surveying existing business pages, creating sample business pages, and reviewing official documentations of included SNSs. The observations indicate that the existing SNSs exhibit vast diversity and impose platform-specific boundaries that result in the fragmentation and dispersion of business information across multiple sites. Accordingly, the next part of the paper explores the potential of SNS APIs as an opportunity for the aggregation and centralization of SNS business information and successively proposes a conceptual model of business page integration. The proposed model is validated and evaluated through a web-based application for the integrated business page search and interaction over multiple SNSs. The discussion taken herein should assist the businesses in choosing an appropriate SNS for their web representation and establishes the grounds and guidelines for next generation of integrated data applications.
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1. Introduction

With the rapid rise of social networking sites (SNSs) and their growing popularity among a broader part of the population (Boyd and Ellison, 2007), the practices of community outreach of the organizations for nurturing the positive and cooperative relationships between themselves and the public have also changed drastically. In the past years, organizations could afford presenting themselves and their products/services solely through the catalogues, vouchers, and other print media and they had far more time to methodically monitor and respond to the community activity (Kane et al., 2009). Currently, however, with the increased degrees of global competition, reduced geographic barriers, and the tendency of the customers to acquire digital information, an online social presence is considered very useful for the organizations (Stelzner, 2014). As the BBC business editor Tim Weber quotes that “these days one witty Tweet, one clever blog post, one devastating video - forwarded to hundreds of friends at the click of a mouse - can snowball and kill a product or damage a company's share price” (Weber, 2010).

Since the business communication is in no way similar to interpersonal communication, a successful social media campaign requires a proper and careful strategy from the organizations on one hand and the appropriate services from social platforms on the other hand. The leading SNSs, therefore, facilitate dedicated spaces for the organizations in the form of Business Pages (aka Company Pages) that offer many opportunities for the businesses that were previously not available or very difficult to acquire for many of them (Jefferson III, Carl E and Traughber, 2012). The benefits that an online presence on a SNS brings for the organizations are wide ranging including the identity over the world, easy and efficient promotion of their products and services to a wider audience, solicitation of customer reviews and identification of their demands and wants in real time, building business reputation through the efficient and timely communication with existing and prospective customers, and gaining insights on what their competitors are offering. Consequently, nowadays almost every organization is represented on one or the other platform for gaining different organizational goals. According to a social media report published by social media examiners for the year 2014, 92% of the 2887 analysed businesses use social media and consider it useful for their business (Stelzner, 2014).

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