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In the last two decades of digitalization, marketing has evolved both as a discipline as well as practice. The marketers are trying to find new and innovative ways to influence today’s well informed and diverse consumer (Court, 2007) who has many new opportunities to seek information, get connected and create user generated content like blogs (Urban, 2005). Therefore, the interaction and exchange of information has changed drastically over the span of recent years (Bush, 2004). The all-pervasive internet technology has become the most important component of the promotion mix (Radulovic, 2011), thus suggesting establishment of new channels for marketing (Bayne, 2002). Among the new promotion tools, social media is emerging as a change agent providing numerous opportunities for the marketers, who are trying to adapt to this new paradigm of communication.
Presently social media is being used by billions of users worldwide and has no doubt become one of the defining technologies of our time. Putting it in perspective, Facebook alone has reported having 2.38 billion monthly active users and 1.56 billion daily active users as of March 31, 2019 (Facebook, 2019). The trends suggest that globally the total number of social media users would grow to 3.29 billion by the year 2022 constituting approximately 42.3 per cent of the world’s population (eMarketer, 2018). Given the fact that a large number of potential users are spending many hours a day on the various social media platforms, it is not surprising that the marketers are embracing social media as a key marketing channel. About 86 per cent of the marketing executives are of the view that social media channels have become important components of their marketing mix (Stelzner, 2013), as they allow the organizations to engage in spontaneous and direct consumer contact at a relatively low cost and higher level of efficiency than those achieved with traditional communication methods (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2019). As a result, Social Media marketing is being used for a variety of marketing objectives, like brand positioning, market research, customer relationship management, and sales promotions. However, Social Media is mostly preferred for branding by most of the marketers (eMarketer, 2013).
Social media platform like Facebook provide excellent tools to engage with customers through ‘Facebook Fan Pages’ (Beukeboom et al., 2015). Facebook fan pages contain information about the brand such as products, services, new launches, events, promotion schemes, website, and contact information. Simultaneously, these fan pages also act as a tool for the users to engage with the company. They have dramatically changed the interaction between consumers and the brands by enabling active informal conversation between them. Users become a member just by liking the fan page and thereafter can ‘like’ the content, share the content or even comment on posts on the fan page. On the other hand fan pages ‘Liked’ by the user can also post updates to the user’s news feed and can also send messages to the users (Facebook.com, 2012).