This chapter explains the roles of social media marketing and brand management in global marketing, thus describing the theoretical and practical concept of social media marketing, the overview of brand management, the significance of social media marketing, and the application of social media-related brand management in global marketing. The creation of social media marketing and brand management is necessary for modern organizations that seek to serve suppliers and customers, increase business performance, enhance competitiveness, and gain routine success in global business. Thus, it is vital for modern organizations to acknowledge their social media marketing and brand management utilization, establish a strategic plan to consistently evaluate their effective promotions, and immediately respond to social media marketing and brand management needs of customers. The chapter argues that applying social media marketing and brand management in global marketing has the potential to enhance organizational performance and achieve strategic goals in the digital age.
TopBackground
The use of social media has immensely grown over the past decade, with technological and Internet innovations like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube achieving massive adoption in a few years. Social media is increasingly important in daily life and is an especially important social interaction mechanism for young people (Luchman, Bergstrom, & Krulikowski, 2014). Social media includes countless sites with very different functions or uses that fulfill different personal needs (Brandtzeg & Heim, 2009). Social media is defined as the perspective of technological innovations in terms of both hardware and software that facilitate inexpensive content creation, interaction, and interoperability by online users (Berthon, Pitt, Plangger, & Shapiro, 2012).
Labrecque et al. (2013) stated that the predictions of growing consumer power in the digital age are fueled by the rise of the Internet and reignited by social media With the proliferation in Web 2.0 technologies, many marketing educators are experimenting with new teaching and learning tools (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Second Life) (Lowe, D'Alessandro, Winzar, Laffey, & Collier, 2013). A typical classification of social media includes collaborative projects (i.e. Wikipedia), blogs, user-generated content communities (i.e., Flickr, YouTube, and Youku/Toduo), virtual game worlds (i.e. EverQuest), and virtual social worlds (i.e. Second Life) (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010).
TopThis section describes the theoretical and practical concept of social media marketing, the overview of brand management, the significance of social media marketing, and the application of social media-related brand management in global marketing.