Social Media Marketing and Brand Equity: A Literature Review

IntroductionSocial media is the usage of web-based and mobile technologies to create, share and consume information and knowledge without any geographical, social, political or demographical boundaries through public interaction in participatory and collaborative way. Kaplan and Haenlein (2010) define social media as a group of internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of web 2.0, and allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content. Social media encompasses wide range of online, word-of-mouth forums including blogs, company-sponsored discussion boards and chat rooms, consumer-to-consumer e-mail, consumer product or service ratings websites and forums, internet discussion boards and forums, moblogs (sites containing digital audio, images, movies, or photographs), and social networking websites, to name few (Mangold and Faulgd, 2009). Social media employ mobile and web-based technologies to create highly interactive platforms via which individuals and communities share, co-create, discuss, and modify user-generated content (Kietzmann et al., 2011). Garnyte and de Avila (2009) argue that social media is world-wide-web tool which enables users to become active creators of the content, to communicate with each other actively, and to create and exchange various information. Global social media users have passed 2 billion mark, which roughly amounts to about 29% of the world's population (Kemp, 2015). The emergence of social media platforms (e.g., Twitter, Facebook) has fundamentally altered the marketing landscape.Social media is here to stay and therefore in future, marketers need to learn to coexist and communicate with an empowered customer. Further, customers are little sensitive to old-fashioned push/interruptive marketing and by and large are determined to participate on equal footing in the marketing process (Constantinides and Fountain, 2008). Organizations have adopted social media at remarkable speed (Barnes and Mattson, 2008). Social media has become powerful networking force connecting people from every corner of the world. It reinforces the process of socialization by being instant, cheap, and easy to use having enormous reach (Miller et al., 2009). While traditional media allows for vertical flow of content from powerful conglomerates to isolated consumers, social media allows information to flow horizontally between consumers (Rosen, 2006). As an integrated marketing medium, social media marketing activities effectively enhance value equity by providing novel value to customers that traditional marketing media do not usually provide. Consumers identify social media as more trustworthy source of information compared to the traditional marketing communication tools which allow organizations to integrate social media marketing into their marketing mix not only to communicate with customer but to get the feedback also (Karamian et al., 2015).Social media marketing makes use of social media tools as an extension to complement the traditional marketing. Gunelius (2010) defined social media marketing as any form of direct or indirect marketing that is used to build awareness, recognition, recall, and action for 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. It is the new paradigm in marketing that has provided ample space for business organizations to maintain successful, long-lasting and value-added relationship with their customers. It allows an enterprise to connect with both existing and potential customers, engage with them and reinforce sense of community around the business organization's products and services (Mangold and Faulgd, 2009). Through social media marketing, the marketers capture the traffic and the attention of various customers to their company, expose their business and cut considerable amount of cost that they would have spent in other types of marketing and communication tools (Rafiee and Sarabdeen, 2013). …