Social Media provides a new channel to marketers and businesses to communicate with their customers and business partners and integrate this media in their business strategy. The large scale growth of the social media and its increasing users has opened up new marketing era for the businesses. However, with enormous growth of the social media and other online channels, the competition has increased worldwide. Correspondingly, the customer retention and satisfaction has come-up as the biggest challenge. It has become necessary to gain and retain the customer trust, so that the existing customers are retained and new customers are attracted. Trust management becomes the most important issue in the online environment to work closely with the existing and potential customers along with the business partners. Present work discusses the important aspects of entrusting, managing and maintaining user trust with the social media marketing strategies. The paper highlights the various prevailing models of the trust management and comes out with the strong arguments to facilitate the user trust for businesses using social media marketing techniques.
Top1. Introduction
The diverse changes in the online environment had forced people to give a rethink to their business strategy for selling and buying of products and services. Businesses are increasingly using the internet for commercial activities (Teo, 2005; As'ad et al., 2012; Ghouri et al., 2012; Anjum et al., 2012) as well as the communications at various levels. Social media marketing is a new concept, which allows people from all over the world to promote their products as well as to communicate and share ideas or opinions with each other on one platform. According to Chikandiwa et al. (2013), Social media marketing is described as a system, which allows marketers to engage, collaborate, interact and harness intelligent crowd sourcing for marketing purposes. Social media marketing has given opportunity to vendors, organizations, business partners, purchasers, sellers, buyers or consumers to buy, sell or advertise their products and services through these social media platforms. Use of social media has also become very much popular as a marketing tool for the establishment and management of customer relationships and to influence the people shopping behaviour (Ruane et al., 2013; Lagrosen et al., 2014).
Social media not only provides a platform to disseminate information about the products and services offered by organisations, but it also provides a platform for conversations and attending to the customer expectations or views. Firms have the opportunity to shift relationships with the consumers from dialogue to trialogue, in which consumers engage in meaningful relationships with one another and with the firms (Hlavinka et al., 2011; Lipsmann et al., 2012; Mangold et al., 2009; Tsimonis et al., 2014). For example: Starbucks, Nike, Coca-Cola and Dell have successfully used social media to obtain customer feedback, create new products and offers, strengthen customer loyalty and engage in online dialogue with followers (Beuker, 2009; Gallaugher and Ransbotham, 2010; Mitic et al., 2012). Social Media Marketing is defined as any form of direct or indirect marketing that is used to build awareness, recognition, recall, and action for a brand, business, product, person, or other entity and is carried out using the tools of the social Web, such as blogging, micro-blogging, social networking, social bookmarking and content sharing (Gunelius, 2011).
Social media marketing industry report 2015 (Stelzner, 2015), which have studied over 3700 marketers with the goal of understanding how they are using social media to grow and promote their businesses, presents a number of significant facts: