A STUDY ON EFFECTIVENESS OF SOCIAL MEDIA ADVERTISING IN INDIA

*Author1 *Palla Malathi Reddy, *Assistant Professor, *CNR College, Gudipala

Mandal, Chittoor District.

*Author2 * Dr.L.Kuladeep Kumar,* Associate Professor,*Chadalawada Ramanamma

Engineering College,* Tirupati

 INTRODUCTION TO SOCIAL MEDIA

"Social media has been broadly defined to the many relatively inexpensive and widely
accessible electronic tools that enable anyone to publish and access information,
collaborate on a common effort or build relationships Social media is defined as "a
Group of Internet-Based Applications that build on the ideological and Technological
foundations and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated
content. Furthermore, social media depends on mobile and web-based technologies to
create highly interactive platforms through which individuals and communities share,
co-create, discuss, and modify User-Generated content.

Social media are Computer-Mediated tools that allow people to create, share, or

exchange information, career interests, ideas, and pictures/videos in Virtual

Communities and Networks.

 SOCIAL MEDIA ADVERTISING

Social media advertising online advertising that focus on social networking services
that utilizes social networking websites such as FACEBOOK and Twitter as a marketing
tool. The goal is to produce content that users will share with their social network to
help a company increase brand exposure and broaden customer reach.

Social media websites allow marketers to employ a broad range of tactics and strategies
to promote content. Many social networks allow users to provide detailed geographical,
demographic, and personal information, which allows marketers to tailor their message
to what is most likely to resonate with the user. Because Internet audiences can be better

Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2751745

segmented than more Traditional marketing channels, companies can ensure that they
are focusing their resources on the audience that they want to target.
A major strategy used in social media marketing is to develop messages and content
that individual users will share with their family, friends, and coworkers. This strategy
relies on word of mouth, and provides several benefits. First, it increases the message’s
reach to networks and users that a social media manager may not have been able to
access otherwise. Second, shared content carries an implicit endorsement when sent by
someone that the recipient knows and trusts.

 WHY IS SOCIAL MEDIA IMPORTANT

With nearly 400 Million active users, Facebook is now the size of the country of
Germany, and adding over 1/2 Million new users per day! Twitter is not as big but is
also growing fast. The phenomenal growth of these online giants ultimately reflects our
compelling desire to connect with each other around common interests

It is the easiest and fastest way to promote your business across the world. If you are
looking for a good marketing strategy to market your products or services, you can use
these networks as an important tool for marketing and expect an increase in sales when
you start using social media for business

 REVIEW OF LITERATURE:

With Social Media’ by Sitaram Asur and Bernardo A. Huberman. They demonstrate

how demonstrate how social media content can be used to predict real-world outcomes.

They further demonstrates how sentiments extracted from Twitter can be further

utilized to improve the forecasting power of social media. In the paper ‗Workplaces

and Social Networking’, the authors Andrea Broughton, Tom Higgins, Ben Hicks and

Annette Cox talks at length the policy and practice relating to the use of social media by

Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2751745

employees. They were guided by the fact that they had already engaged to some extent

with the issue of social media, what it might mean for their organization and how they

were going to formulate and communicate a policy to staff in two major UK employers.

The first organisation was British Telecom (BT), and the second organization was Her

Majesty‘s Revenue and Customs (HMRC). In the paper, ‗Predicting tie strength with

Social Media’, Eric Gilbert and Karrie Karahalios, d presents a predictive model that

maps social media data to tie strength. The model builds on a dataset of over 2,000

social media ties and performs quite well, distinguishing between strong and weak ties

with over 85% accuracy.

Social media is a phenomenon that has drawn a lot of attention both to companies and

individuals interacting on the networking landscape. However, when it comes to giving

a clear definition of what social media really is, the understanding of the term is very

minimal. Managers and academic researchers seem to differ on how social media differ

from interchangeable related concept web 2.0 and User Generated Content (Kaplan and

Haenlein: 2009).

Looking way back into the history of the internet where social media might have

evolved from, a clear understanding of related concepts can be derived. In 1979,

Truscott and Ellis from Duke University created the Usenet, a worldwide discussion

system that allowed users to post public messages. Usenet is a hybrid between email

and web forums and the discussions therein are threaded with modern news reader

software (http://nzblord.com/usenet/).User Generated Content entered usage in 2005;

Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2751745

it covers a variety of media information available. It includes all digital media

technologies such as, digital video, blogging, podcasting, forums, review-sites, social

networking, mobile phone photography and wikis. Hence User Generated Content is a

sum of all ways in which people make use of social media (Kaplan and Haenlein 2009).

Web 2.0 is a term that was coined by Tim O‟Reilly in 2004, however since its inception;

it has remained difficult to define. Nonetheless web 2.0 is all about information sharing

and collaboration on the World Wide Web. Coherently, Alexander and Levine (2008)

identified two essential features that are instrumental in distinguishing web 2.0 projects

from the rest of the web: micro content and social media. The micro content feature

enables authors to create small pieces of content, with each piece conveying a primary

idea or concept. The pieces are smaller than websites and are meant to be reused in

multiple ways and places. Examples of such pieces can be found in YouTube comments,

Picasa images, blog posts and wiki edits which are only few thousand bytes. In addition

to the above description of what web 2.0 is about, an assertion has been made that

software developers and end-users started to utilize World Wide Web in order to

continuously modify contents and applications in a participatory and collaborative

fashion. As a matter of fact, web 2.0 is considered to be platform for the evolution of

Social media. In view of this, Kaplan and Haenlein (2009) define Social media as a

group of internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological

foundations of web 2.0 and that allow the creation and exchange of User Generated

Content. The intertwining of the descriptions of the concepts will continually create

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uproar as to who can best define the terms satisfactorily; consequently the subject on

social media will therefore remain synonymous among many social network users and

managers. It is fair to believe that this is a metamorphosis of the networking community

that first evolved in late 1970s. Due to the rising technological advancements the

changes seem to take different forms and names but the main features are quite similar.

It is a perspective that is also supported by Marshall McLuhan, that social media is the

framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the

frame”.

Over the years marketers have researched on how best customers/prospective

customer relationship with the producer (company) can be enhanced. The debate was

first initiated by Grönroos (1994) with the declaration of paradigm shift from marketing

mix to relationship marketing concluding that marketing is a multi-faceted social

process and therefore the traditional 4Ps has become absolute and irrelevant because of

the evolving trends in business, such as strategic partnerships, alliances and networks

(Grönroos 1994). The interesting dimension in the debate was introduced by Morgan

and Hunt (1994) who suggested that a successful relationship between business and its

customers requires commitment and trust (Morgan and Hunt 1994). The interactions

between the business and the customer ought to be an ongoing process, on continuous

discrete basis with a view of seeing a customer as a relationship partner (Grönroos 2005:

21). The rational for this study was motivated by a personal interest in the social media

and also the desire to investigate the impact and the relationship between social media

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and brand awareness from a business perspective. A quick review of the literature

reveals that though social media and advertising (Palmer & Lewis: 2007, Tuten 2008,

Webber 2007) has been researched, but not the impacts of social media on brand

awareness from a business perspective. However, the work of Harris and Rae‟s (2011)

titled, “building a personal brand through social networking” is the closest study that

looked at the social media networks and branding. Nevertheless, Harris and Rae‟s

work purely focused on building personal image (brand) using social networks. Dutta

(2010) also looked at the impact of social media from a personal view in his Harvard

business review article. And therefore, since there is little knowledge concerning the

impact of social media on awareness from a business level, this study is to investigate

the impacts of the social media phenomenon on brand awareness and its

implementation challenges. Recently; we have seen the impact of Facebook and the rise

of its market value in terms of brand equity. According to an analyst, the rise of

Facebook‟s market value to $3.71bn was a result of the social media popularity that has

made the company users and advertising revenue increase

During 2008 US Presidential elections, President Obama used social media effectively

during campaigns and later became a brand name online. The study is therefore

designed to explore the impact of the social media on branding as marketing activity

and also determine whether the traditional advertising media such as radio and print

have died and are no longer effective as a result of the social media.

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  NEED FOR THE STUDY
Hubspot , 92% of marketers in 2014 claimed that social media marketing was important

for their business, with 80% indicating their efforts increased traffic to their websites.

And according to Social Media Examiner, 97% of marketers are currently participating

in social media—but 85% of participants aren’t sure what social media tools are the best

to use. This demonstrates a huge potential for social media marketing to increase sales,

but a lack of understanding on how to achieve those results

Advertisers worldwide are spending $23.68 billion on paid media to reach consumers

on social networks this year, according to new figures 33.5% increase from 2014.

By 2017, social network ad spending will reach $35.98 billion, representing 16.0% of all

digital ad spending Globally.

Therefore it is important for the companies to understand how far their efforts are

reaching and how they can maximize the reach of their advertising.

OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY:

 To investigate and analyze the key factors that affect the effectiveness of
advertisements on Ffacebook, Twitter and other Social Media Channels.
 To find the impact of interaction through these communication among
users(with reference to Facebook and Twitter)

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  RESEARCH GAP:

From the above Literature Review it can be concluded that marketing decision is increasing in
complexity at an accelerating pace. Advertising decision, as a class is more difficult to model
than other business decisions. Many of the methods that have been developed for modeling the
marketing decisions and are inadequate when checked with real world results.

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY:

Type of Research Method:

. A survey was conducted with the help of structured questionnaire. The study uses a

descriptive research method.

 DESIGN OF QUESTIONNAIRE:

A study was carried out at Financial Services Industry in India. The

questionnaire is designed based on Functional and Technical aspects. The Social Media
effectiveness scale is implemented using CVM model of Saaksjarvi and Talvinen’s
(1993), as well as ELAM model.

Sampling Method

Table: 1.1Distribution of the Respondents in the Sample

Andhra
Sector wise Karnataka Tamil Nadu
Pradesh State
Financial state wise state wise Total
wise
Institutions Respondents respondents
respondents

Manufacturing 06 25 40 71

Service 30 40 27 97

Total 168

The distribution of respondents is given in the table 1.1.

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 In this study Survey method is implemented to collect the information from the

respondents and distributed to the Marketing executives in Financial Service industry.

The data has collected through mail survey and personal interview method which is

employed through Convenience Sampling.

 Data Collection:

A total of 504 questionnaires were distributed among Marketing

Executives in Financial service Industry. Out of these, 168 is 34% duly filled

questionnaires were received.

 Statistical Tools: For Examination of Hypothesis 1 applied factor analysis to

study the underlying dimensions of Social Media impact on Marketing Strategy

in India.

 Findings & Conclusions :

According to Saaksjavari and Talvinen was applied to measure the system effectiveness , the

components of competing value model uses Human Relations Model, Open system Model,

Internal Process Model and Rational Goal Models are used to examine the Social Media

effectiveness. Grover et al.,1968 says that Social Media measures are classified into the

following dimensions viz., Infusion measures, Market measures, and Economic Measures. This

study examines to measure Social Media effectiveness as considers CVM , ELAM, TAM models

to measure the effectiveness of Social Media. The results says that the Social Media

effectiveness leads to Economic Measures (Impact), Influence to Good Planning ( Influences)

and Market Analytics (response) as shown in figure

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 Figure 1.1 Effectiveness of social Media

Social Media
Channels Functional aspects Effective Social
of Social Media Media
Facebook
Economic Measures
Coordination with Project management
Twitter implementation of
Promotion budget
organizational
programs Marketing budget
Youtube Coordination of
functional groups
Market share of
LinkedIn organizaion Influence to good
planning
Operational planning
Orkut Influences Analysis & Forecast leads to
Selection of Distribution
channels
Skype Long term strategies Training for marketing
executives
Decision making
Product
development Ease to Perform Market
Facebook, twitter,
Evaluation & analytics
orkut,
MySpFacebook, control Product Analysis
twitter, orkut, Market analysis
MySpace, Skype Identifying training
product performance
aceFacebook, Skype needs of HR of product design
marketing Performance evaluation
department

The figure 1.1 shows that the impact of technical aspects impact on functional Social
media leads to Social Media effectiveness. The effectiveness of Social Media are categorized
into three predominant dimensions.

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Economic measures under this, four components are determined, viz., Project Management,
Promotional Budget, Marketing Budget and Co-ordination of functional groups it shows the
effect on economic measures.

Influence to Good Planning: In order to influence good planning, selection of distribution

channels, training for marketing executives and decision making are inevitable components that
influence on marketing plan.
Ease to perform market analytics: The influence of product analysis, market analysis, product
performance, product design and performance evaluation makes convenient to perform Market
analytics

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