ReviewSocial media metrics and analytics in marketing – S3M: A mapping literature review
Introduction
Web 2.0 tools and the appearance of social media seem to have redefined the marketing strategy, research and practice, broadening marketing’s potential. These potentials go beyond customers’ information and expand on commitment and engagement levels. Constantinides and Fountain (2008) define Web 2.0 “as a collection of open-source, interactive and user-controlled online applications expanding the experiences, knowledge and marketing power of the users as participants in business and social process […] supporting the creation of informed users’ networks facilitating the flow of ideas and knowledge by allowing the efficient generation, dissemination, sharing and editing/refining of information content”.
Social media produce a vast amount of measurable useful data to analysts and marketers whose goal is to monitor and analyze behavioral targeting, brand loyalty and further marketing performance indicators, rendering these data effective. To do that, specific marketing metrics goals need to be clearly defined. Without a specific plan, regarding also the key performance indicators choices, data analysts together with marketers will fail to direct the social media data into useful insights for the companies. For that purpose, firms must precisely raise questions and search answers from social media listening in order to transform data in social media metrics. Social media analysis, therefore, consists of collecting, measuring, evaluating and finally interpreting data (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010).
Since the first appearance of social media, marketers have noticed the potential of such technology in business (Mangold & Faulds, 2009). Social media can serve as an effective marketing tool in business, valuable for both consumers and companies, offering a wide range of opportunities (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010). Therefore, social media show an unprecedented increase of use inside business. Even though, understanding social media is a crucial, but not a simple procedure. Several definitions are classified in order to fully explore the dynamics of social media in marketing.
This study presents a complete base for understanding and describing social media metrics and social media analytics related to marketing strategy, policy and research, by reviewing the relevant literature. The objective of this paper is an extensive review of articles related to social media metrics and analytics in marketing, creating a mapping review/systematic map of the relevant material. The primary goal in this article is to create a conceptual classification scheme (named S3M) for the extant literature by using five distinct dimensions/criteria of classification, such as: Methodology of research, Type of analysis, Field of study, Marketing objectives, and Social media types/platforms. As a result, the most used subsectors from each category are identified, featuring the new upcoming trends in social media marketing. The findings of this study are expected to benefit researchers and marketers by helping them to better understand what has been hitherto achieved. It is our primary hope that the proposed framework will serve as a valuable classification system for researchers, academics and practitioners who conduct similar research.
The paper is structured as follows. The next section presents the research methodology we follow. In the following section we present the classification of the literature, providing a discussion section for each category. The final section summarizes our work, offering concluding remarks, future research directions and limitations that rise from our study.
Section snippets
Research methodology
Social media marketing as a science field is difficult to restrict only in few specific disciplines. Τhis difficulty arises due to the multidisciplinary nature of the sciences and industry fields involved. Based on our proposal, articles associated to S3M can be found in five types of journals: Marketing and e-Marketing, E-Business and Management, Behavioral sciences, ICT/Information systems and Social media. In order to limit the collection of articles, we take some restrictions into
Classification of the literature
The amount of the techniques related to social media and their applications in order to spread brand awareness or promote particular products is called Social Media Marketing (SMM). SMM uses mainly the features of social media, such as online communities, social data etc. (Neti, 2011). In the literature, social media marketing is combined with metrics and/or analytics tools, methodologies and techniques. Social media metrics represent the tangible outcome of monitoring, measuring, reporting,
Future research directions & limitations
Marketing science, together with information technology, has great interest in understanding and analyzing social media and their created data. We present a complete-scale study, aiming to create a typology for social media metrics and analytics related articles, within a continuously incremental and editable typology. The findings contribute to the literature in several ways. The proposed typology is flexible, which means that future literature reviews on a subject can contribute, based on the
References (67)
- et al.
CARESOME
Know.-Based Syst.
(2015) - et al.
How do small firms learn to develop a social media competence?
International Journal of Information Management
(2015) - et al.
Use of social media for corporate communications by research-funding organisations in the UK
Public Relations Review
(2013) - et al.
Predicting the influence of users’ posted information for eWOM advertising in social networks
Electronic Commerce Research and Applications
(2014) - et al.
Social interaction via new social media: (How) can interactions on Twitter affect effectual thinking and behavior?
Journal of Business Venturing
(2011) - et al.
A role for startups in unleashing the disruptive power of social media
International Journal of Information Management
(2016) - et al.
Social media marketing efforts of luxury brands: influence on brand equity and consumer behavior
Journal of Business Research
(2016) The use of social media in sales: individual and organizational antecedents, and the role of customer engagement in social media
Industrial Marketing Management
(2016)- et al.
We’re all connected: the power of the social media ecosystem
Business Horizons
(2011) - et al.
Social media competitive analysis and text mining: a case study in the pizza industry
International Journal of Information Management
(2013)
Deep sentiment analysis: mining the causality between personality-value-attitude for analyzing business ads in social media
Expert Systems with Applications
Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media
Business Horizons
Social media use by government: from the routine to the critical
Government Information Quarterly
The tweets that killed a university: A case study investigating the use of traditional and social media in the closure of a state university
Computers in Human Behavior
Do social media marketing activities enhance customer equity? An empirical study of luxury fashion brand
Journal of Business Research
Ontology-based sentiment analysis of twitter posts
Expert Systems with Applications
Social analytics: Learning fuzzy product ontologies for aspect-oriented sentiment analysis
Decision Support Systems
Understanding the perceived community value of Facebook users
Computers in Human Behavior
Managing customer relationships in the social media era: introducing the social CRM house
Journal of Interactive Marketing
Social media: the new hybrid element of the promotion mix
Business Horizons
Facebook as a destination marketing tool: evidence from Italian regional Destination Management Organizations
Tourism Management
Usage, barriers and measurement of social media marketing: an exploratory investigation of small and medium B2 B brands
Industrial Marketing Management
More than words: social networks’ text mining for consumer brand sentiments
Expert Systems with Applications
Engaging consumers online through websites and social media: a gender study of Italian Generation Y clothing consumers
International Journal of Information Management
Are customers’ reviews creating value in the hospitality industry? Exploring the moderating effects of market positioning
International Journal of Information Management
Data mining of social networks represented as graphs
Computer Science Review
Engagement across three social media platforms: An exploratory study of a cause-related PR campaign
Public Relations Review
A framework of social media engagement: Case studies with food and consumer organisations in the UK and Ireland
International Journal of Information Management
Social media campaign metrics in latvia
Procedia − Soc. Behav. Sci.
Social media analytics for competitive advantage
Computers & Graphics
Factors influencing popularity of branded content in Facebook fan pages
European Management Journal
How does brand-related user-generated content differ across youTube, facebook, and twitter?
Journal of Interactive Marketing
The role of digital and social media marketing in consumer behavior
Current Opinion in Psychology
Cited by (123)
Technology distraction in Generation Z: The effects on consumer responses, sensory overload, and discomfort
2024, International Journal of Information ManagementUsing big data for generating firm-level innovation indicators - a literature review
2023, Technological Forecasting and Social ChangeFrom the black box to the glass box: Using unsupervised and supervised learning processes to predict user engagement for the airline companies
2023, International Journal of Information Management Data InsightsWhat to post? Understanding engagement cultivation in microblogging with big data-driven theory building
2023, International Journal of Information ManagementDeep learning-based social media mining for user experience analysis: A case study of smart home products
2023, Technology in Society