Social Media Marketing The Case of Africa

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Social Media Marketing; The Case of Africa.
Research · October 2016

DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.20612.73609/1
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Social Media Marketing; The Case of Africa.
Challenges of Social Media Marketing In Africa.
A research project submitted to the

Institute of Technology Entrepreneurship and Commercialization,
Department of Systems and Computer Engineering, Technology Innovation Management,
Carleton University
Ontario, Canada.
In partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of
Master of Engineering, (M.Eng.), Technology Innovation Management
AFOLABI, Adeleye
100915432.
February 2015.
Acknowledgement
First, I have to thank God for taking me through my years in graduate school; it is only by his
grace I have gone this far.
I also want to thank Professor Mika Westerlund, my supervisor and a great mentor, for his
thorough supervision and putting me on track during the course of this project. He is a true
professional. I won’t forget the effort of my Professors, Michael Weiss, Steve Muegge, and an
academic father and a motivator, Professor Tony Bailetti, and other Professors that I have come
across in my pursuit of knowledge in Carleton University.
Lastly, I have to thank Doctor Yemi, Engineer Abiodun for their ideas and assistance, and every
manager and organizational staff I came across throughout the cause of this project.
I thank you and may God bless you all.
Supervisor
Professor Mika Westerlund, D. Sc. (Econ.) M. Sc. (Econ)
Abstract
Following recent global trends in the media landscape with the creation of increasingly powerful
mobile devices and social networks, marketing has dramatically changed over the past decade.
With traditional media such as newspapers and television now supplemented by social media
(e.g. blogs, online communities, networks), the situation is not well understood in African
markets with respect to (i) the acceptance of the digital divide in Africa, i.e. the shift in market
communication and relative impact of social media, (ii) marketers’ integration of social media
into their existing marketing culture, i.e. to promote brands, increase communication efforts, and
marketing outcomes, and also (iii) active participation and engagement on social platforms, i.e.
functional and keen commitment on these marketing platforms now that the conversation has
shifted towards social media campaigns.
The purpose of this research is to take account of this evolution, and provide an introduction to
the general topic of social media marketing and customer relationship management. Herein, this
research defines what mobile social media is, what it is not, and how it differs from other types
of marketing applications. Furthermore, it lays emphasis on how firms can make use of social
media for marketing research, communication, and relationship development.
This research suggests that using social media is an appropriate marketing strategy to promote
developing nations because of its participative, interactive, open and transparent nature. Based
on research findings from a wide array of literature, the research identifies the main ways Africa
corporations can use social media as strategic marketing instruments. It identifies the main
types of social media applications and proposes two main ways marketers can utilize them; as
‘passive marketing tools’ i.e. as sources of market intelligence, and as ‘active marketing tools’
i.e. as platforms of communication, promotion, brand awareness, consumer interaction and, a
feedback mechanism.
Keywords: Social Media, Marketing, Community, Communication, Engagement, Participation,

and Africa.
Introduction
In the last decade there has been a major shift from traditional media to new ways of
communication. The second generation consisted of Internet-based applications, i.e. Web 2.0 or
what Shih (2009) refers to as the fourth revolution, where individual users generate and control
communication, and plays a major role to significantly increase marketing efforts with viral
marketing campaigns for awareness (Thackeray et.al. 2008). To Harridge & Quinton (2009),
these networking technologies provide opportunities that enable relationship building within
peers and also between consumers and marketers. Previous studies have demonstrated that
the corporate adoption of social media primarily by US companies is now at the highest rate
(Barnes & Mattson 2008). Hence, with the newness and probable benefit of the internet-based
applications, marketers may be tempted to adopt social media in their promotional plans.
Social media is the current explosive new trend. For firms, it creates a business
opportunity that goes beyond the traditional middleman in communication by connecting
companies directly with their customers. Now, several businesses, from big companies like
Dell1, Coca Cola2, Best Buy3, to the music industry4, are seeking to engage in social media as
part of their marketing activities. Although some businesses were unsure about social media
few years ago, such as Apple5, but eventually adopted this marketing initiative over time. Social
media marketing, similar to the introduction of traditional forms of marketing, such as email and
TV ads, which prevailed over word-of-mouth marketing, now disrupts the modern marketing
wave and here to stay, as companies are rapidly integrating it into the functions.
This form of marketing appears in many forms including social networks, blogs and
microblogs, wikis, virtual worlds, writing communities, social bookmarking, forums and message
boards, tagging and news, writing communities, news feeds, contents, data, podcast portals,
image and video sharing, and collective intelligence. The social media phenomenon is growing
is at a fast pace. It facilitates trust in marketing with its open communication and participatory
culture. Currently, it can be referred to as the only marketing platform that offers and encourage
reliable communication and accountability between market brands and consumers. Global
1
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jenniferrooney/2012/09/25/in-dell-social-media-journey-lessons-for-marketers-
2
http://www.businessinsider.com/presentation-social-media-and-brand-management-at-coca-cola-2010-4
3
http://www.stayonsearch.com/best-buy-using-social-media-to-connect-with-customers
4
http://www.theorganicagency.com/social-media-redefined-music-industry/
5
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2014/09/09/is-apple-getting-over-its-allergy-to-social-media/
companies, from Nike6 to Starbucks7, have acknowledged social media as an acceptable
marketing platform, by using them to increase their advertising campaign.
However, with social media opportunities, come specific challenges for Africa marketers,
many of who naively treated the online channel as they would treat a magazine or television
spot and ultimately alienating themselves from their target audience. Marketers are faced with
difficulties resulting from the dramatic rise of social media to how they can use it to generate
value for their firms. Whereas the importance of social media for brand management and
customer relationship management is widely recognized, it is unclear whether social media can
also help African firms market sell products and increase engagement with their brands. This
paper introduces the application of social media for marketing in Africa developing economies.
6
https://digitalfireflymarketing.com/how-nike-killing-it-social-media-marketing
7
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/19/business/media/19starbux.html?_r=3&partner=rss&emc=rss
Social Media Acceptance
1.0 Social Media Marketing Defined

Marketing, as defined by the American Marketing Association, is an activity, set of
institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings
that have value for customers, clients, partners, and the society at large. It can be categorized
into three major forms, which are; Push – business that advocate their market idea to a broad
audience, Pull – business that attracts customers that are interested in their products, and
Engagement Marketing – business that engages their customers of what they consider
meaningful and productive by communication.
To Berthon et al. (2012), the 21st century has brought both opportunities and challenges
in our global, boundaryless world to information where managers face a dynamic and
interconnected environment. Thus, effective communication is and will always be the key to
success in life and business, as it seems to be the driving force behind many technological
advances that continue to shape business practices, since the origination of the computers, with
new communication technologies like e-mail, instant messaging, and the Internet that can be
very good news for both productivity and quality of life (Malone, 2004), and social media
(Kalakota & Robinson, 2001). This has led to marketing practices through social media, which
can be termed as ‘Social media marketing’. The ‘social media’ word emerged as connectivity
between two or more virtual world of information (Standlee, 2009). It is renowned for its instant
online presence, which differs it from the default means of marketing - direct or email marketing.
According to Kazim & Filiz (2011), social media, which started as a means of entertainment at
first, then became the most recent marketing strategy due to its notable advantages in the
business field in relation to widespread audience, time, network relation, as well as cost issues.
Therefore, social media can be best defined in the context of the previous modern media
examples, traditional media. Traditional media such as television, newspapers, radio and
magazines are in a one-direction and static display technologies, while Social media is a set of
internet-based applications and websites that allow users to communicate directly with friends
and strangers alike (Kaplan & Haeinlen, 2010).
Researchers have found that Social Media Marketing (SMM) is primarily internet-based
but has similarities with non-internet based marketing methods like word-of mouth marketing
(Paul, 2007; Dave, 2010; Saravanakumar & Suganthalakshmi, 2012). Feige (2013) views SMM
as the way of promoting a brand, website, or business by interacting with or attracting the
interest of current or prospective customers through the channels of social media. Also, social
media marketing set up an effective online presence by quickly learning the value of spreading
message by ‘word of mouse’ rather than ‘word of mouth’ (Goldenberg et al., 2001). As a result
of the sincere dedication to self-promotion through social media, Shao (2009) believed success
almost seems certain since the social media is perceived on the global stage as a scene to be
performed on a daily through which people can interact and share.
Safko (2012) also made a point that Social media marketing allows you to engage your
customers and prospects in a conversation with the content they want. Hence, as social media
continues to develop and evolve with new applications appearing every day, its characteristics
verifies to its power to transform how we buy, sell, engage, and live in this digital age.
Notwithstanding, for a firm to engage in social media marketing requires an understanding of
the full range of sites and tools at their disposal. Social media contain six categories, which are;
• Social news/E-mail newsletters - Digital flyers that let people know about your products
or services.
• Bookmarking sites - Similar to digital yellow stickers that let other members of the online
community know that you like an article or a Web page.
• Social networks - a casual place where you can go to talk about what you did over the
weekend, tell a dirty joke, or tell where you were last week, such as Facebook and
twitter.
• Media Sharing - Digital sites such as Instagram, Flickr, Kodak Gallery, and Soundcloud
where people can upload their favorite photos or music
• Blogs & Forums - Digital magazines or diaries that are often written in an informal, chatty
style, where people can digitally write their thoughts, comments, or suggestions on a
digital board hosted on a website, such as WordPress and Blogger.
Various social media communication tools have emerged in the context of globalization with
the support of Information Technology within the above six categories. Popular social media
tools include Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, and a host of others within these
platforms where users are the creators. We can harness these social media and social
networking tools to inform, engage, and entice our customers. We can develop these
applications and use them to promote our businesses and realize our full potential.
However, with ‘social media’ and ‘social media marketing’, the two terms have a
tendency to become interchangeable. But each is a distinct and separate entity that can be
tailored to build and develop strong brand awareness and recognition (Barwise & Strong, 2002),
increase your marketing profile (Buss & Strauss, 2009), nurture new product development (Piller
et al., 2012), and increase profits and funding options (Lathrop, 2013).
Therefore, Social Media Marketing is a process that works from a subject perspective
based on two emphases. The first emphasis here is on the person or individual involved, and
secondly the business interests. This marketing approach shifts from an impersonal
advertisement of personal profile on social media, to where your commercial venture now has a
human face. Also, by becoming a member of a social network, you are identifying with the
common perspective of the group, which basically focuses on communication and sharing.
1.1 The Shift in Marketing Communication

In today’s knowledge-based world, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)
plays a central role in boosting market productivity and overall economic growth. In the past
years, technology applications such as email and text or video chats were the basic means that
organizations employed to increase communication between themselves and their consumers.
Although these various mediums have been useful for organizations, they have also resulted in
some unexpected problems too. For instance, as soon as organizations began to communicate
with their customers with emails, the main problems were in relation to the technology, e.g. their
mailing website, server, or internet speed, which had nothing to do with organizational
modification or alterations that might be needed, such as assigning a trained personnel to reply
to customers request one after the other. Therefore, such organization’s emails took days,
weeks, or even if they got sent or delivered at all to customers. The technology resulted to
customer frustration and disappointment.
Abraham (2006) emphasized on the importance of an increase of 10 mobile phone users

among 100 people, shown to boost a region’s GDP growth by almost 1%. Also, according to
Leonard et al. (2005), a percentage increase in the total number of Internet users can increase
the GDP growth by 4.3 percent. But just as many organizations felt that they have understood
and had taken control of business and the Internet, along came a wave of new technologies that
changed the cultural norms of communication and that effectively rendered many managers
confused and helpless in a world where consumer time zones have become invisible and
communication tends to be immediate. With innovation in technology, communication methods
have improved drastically in recent times. Various communication tools have surfaced over the
years that has led to a radical shift in the ways business is usually operated and how people
communicate. Smith & Taylor (2004) articulates the value of market communication as always
specific and is determined by the customer or the beneficiary, and further noted that the effect of
the market communication depends much on the communicators and the responders. If a
company buys a 30-seconds TV spot to air their brand during a particular show, it will appear.
However, as a viewer, you cannot avoid walking away from the couch to use the washroom,
thereby missing the commercial. Even if you do not, you still cannot share it with your friends,
which makes this role totally passive. But, within the social web, companies have no control
over their messages than the audience. It doesn’t matter if they spent huge amount of money on
a video in the hope that it goes viral on YouTube. If people like it, then they will sell. And if they
don’t, then they won’t and as well might result to loss.
Today, the contemporary social world has witnessed the emergence of private
computers, the Internet, and e-commerce, which have all had a great impact on how businesses
function and promote (Avlonitis & Karayanni, 2000). The emergence of social media technology
is accelerating and can be expected to have a similar impact on businesses now and in the
future. As new technologies emerge, business that learn to use innovative technologies dwell on
great profits (Capon & Glazer, 1987). Some examples include technology-driven companies
such as Xerox, Microsoft, Amazon and Google. Moreover, the explosive growth of the smart
phone market and mobile computing is affecting the market communication strategy (Zeng & Ni,
2010), as social media, device owners, and wireless connectivity in smartphones is becoming
easier and even helping social media to grow even faster (Lenhart et al., 2010).
Few years back in the 1990s, when the spontaneous use of mobile phones expanded
rapidly in much of the developed regions, hardly anyone would have thought of Africa as a
potential market. In a little over a decade, the continent has become the world's second most
connected region by mobile subscriptions, and has witnessed the fastest growth in mobile
subscribers in the world on track to hit one billion mobile subscriptions by 2015, according to
Informa Telecoms1. Now, with more than 629 million subscribers2, its market is larger than North
America's. A similar story now seems again to be unfolding as Africans are pairing their already
extensive use of mobile phones with a more recent and massive interest in social media -
internet-based tools and platforms that allows people to interact with each other much more
than in the past. In so doing, Africans tend to be leading what may be the next global trend on
the continent, a major shift to mobile internet use, with social media as its main drivers.
According to Internetlivestats3, Africa's Internet users (more than 268 million at the end
of 2014) represent just a small percentage of the 2.9 billion people online around the world, with
the US alone reportedly having more than 270 million people use the Internet4. Within Africa,
one person out of every 10 is estimated to be an Internet user, thus making the continent the
region with the lowest penetration rate in the world. Although, many believes Africa mobile
subscription would pass 1 billion by the end of 2016, thus making it the world second largest
mobile market5.
Studies suggest that Africans spend so much of their time on Facebook and YouTube
when they go online, mostly with their mobile phones (Jamme, 2011). Even in other continents
such as Europe, where Livingstone et al. (2011) conducted a face-to-face survey of 25,000
participants within age bracket 9 to16 year old Internet users and their parents in 25 countries
and found that social networking is the most popular activity among European children with 38%
of the 9 -12 year olds and 77% of the 13-16 year olds having a social networking profile e.g.
Facebook. Furthermore, Jamme (2011) noted that the older purpose of the Internet such as
sending and reading e-mails, reading news and posting research queries have become less
important Internet activities for Africans. Africa's upward trend in the use of social media is even
more overwhelming given the low percentage of Africans connected to the Internet and the
many hurdles Africans face in trying to go online, with lack of internet connectivity a major
problem in the most developing countries. Also, among the many reasons for this poor
indication are the scarcity and prohibitive costs of broadband connections (the fastest means of
accessing the Internet), as well as the limited number of personal computers in use.
But these challenges have simultaneously contributed to a remarkable growth rate in

mobile Internet use in Africa, which in recent years has been the highest in the world6. Jon von
Tetzchner, co-founder of Opera, the world's most popular Internet browser for mobile phones
once noted that "Triple-digit growth rates are routine across the continent, as the widespread
availability of mobile phones means that the mobile Web can reach tens of millions more than
the wired Web7." Also, Jon von Tetzchner believed that like mobile phones, whose use has
grown rapidly in Africa in recent years, the mobile Web is beginning to reshape the economic,
political and social development of the continent.
With over 864 million mobile connections8 that makes Africa representing the highest
growth of mobile Internet usage, which represents the world’s highest usage in recent years, by
means of social media that directly connects Africans through services such as Facebook,
Twitter and MXit. MXit is a free instant messaging application that originated in South Africa,
with an estimated 7 million users, and the most popular local social network service (Napolitano,
2010), although Facebook is one of the most visited websites in Africa and has been launched
in local native languages of communication for Africans, such as Swahili, Hausa and Zulu. Peter
Hartwell, a senior researcher in HP Labs once quoted that “with a trillion sensors embedded in
the environment - all connected by computing systems, software, and services - it will be
possible to hear the heartbeat of the Earth, impacting human interaction with the globe as
profoundly as the Internet has revolutionized communication”9. Conclusively, this stipulates that
the rapid rise of social media provides great opportunities for communication markets in Africa,
especially for businesses seeking to engage Africa’s young and rapidly expanding consumer
class.
1.2 Preliminary existence of the Digital divide in Africa
A United Nations Human Development Report showed Sub-Saharan Africa as the least
developed region of the world in terms of educational percentage, prospects for life, and gross
national income (UNHDR, 2005). Africa is the continent mostly struck by poverty and other
global problems (Develtere et al., 2008; Adato et al., 2006). As a result of these, Globalization is
very limited few countries in Africa. Globalization is associated to digital divide because
technology plays a key role in material wealth and wealth production is more and more based
on technology and individual knowledge. With this, a major advantage to marketers relates to
understanding the benefits that emerges and can be derived from a less industrialized continent
such as Africa from the rise of the Internet and social media.
Castells (2002) defines the digital divide as ‘inequality of access to the Internet’. Also,
Van (2006) sees digital divide as the gap between individuals who have no access to computers
and the Internet. Norris (2001) sees it as an inconsistency within the online community. And
according to Wilson (2006), the digital divide is the inequality in access, distribution, and use of
information and communication technologies between two or more populations. All these above
definitions can be attributed to access barriers to Internet, thus hindrances to globalization and
development. Furthermore, Van and Hacker (2003) lay emphasis on four types of barriers to
access, with respect to the digital divide, as;
• mental access – lack of elementary digital experience.

• skill access – educational/learning digital skills to operate
• material access – refers to lack of ownership of computer and network

connections
• usage skills – absence of user experience
The digital divide is a problem that continues to have massive effect on the African
continent, especially as other continents continue to grow. For Wilson (2006), there are eight
major areas of the digital divide: physical access (access to ICT devices), financial access (cost
of ICT services relative to annual income), cognitive access (ICT skills), design access
(usability), content access (availability of relevant applications and information online),
production access (capacity to produce one’s own content), institutional access (availability of
institutions that enable access), and political access (access to the governing institutions where
the rules of the game are written). Although, several studies associated the digital divide as a
lack of economic and technological resources in Africa, with the same emanating from corrupt
African government that led to lack of investment prospects for the continent (Dasgupta et al.,
2001; Bailard, 2009; Luyt, 2004).
Furthermore, some authors believed the digital divide to be just a technical problem and
insisted that access to materials and other possibilities with an opening of technological markets
will eventually result in an immediate closing of the gap (Wilson, 2006; Bailard, 2009). Societal
information researchers such as Castells (2002) and van Dijk (2005) concluded that the main
cause for different types of the digital divide such as the gender, age, ethical, global,
educational, and income divide is structural inequality. Although, this research emphasize on
the preliminary existence of the digital divide in Africa, which means that the least developed
African countries in terms of income, education, and health are believed to have very low
Internet access and usage rates. For example, Ghana and South Africa are two major countries
in Africa who have indicated that neoliberal policies of deregulation, liberalization, and as well as
privatization of the telecommunication sector as suggested by the World Bank and the
International Monetary Funds (IMF), but yet, have not succeeded in bridging the digital divide in
Africa and the global digital divide. Precisely in Ghana, the markets have been extremely
reformed and free; yet the number of Internet users in Africa is still very low, resulting to high
poverty and the income gaps. South Africa markets have also been increasingly reformed and
modern commercial actors in the telecommunications area have materialized. Now, the total
number of telephone, Internet, and mobile phone users increased continuously, but the digital
divide remains the same, as South Africa is still a country impaired by poverty, unequal income
distribution, and as well as high crime rates.
The digital divide is a problem for Africa that is due to structural inequalities of the global
network society, which is a society characterized by social and digital factors. The global digital
divide signifies unequal usage, benefit, skills, materials, and conventional access to modern
information and communication technologies by different world regions. Since the globalization
of capitalism excludes parts of the developing regions, such as Africa, who is considered as
unimportant in economic, political, and cultural terms by Western actors (Fuchs, 2003).
Furthermore, the lack of economic and technological resources in Africa is not as a result of
corrupt African governments and also do not imply bad governance or lack of investment
conditions towards westernization on the continent, but the result of hundreds of years of post-
colonial exploitation, exclusion, and dependency of the Third World that has caused the very
conditions that Africans have to face today.
1.3 Social Media Marketing Acceptance

Even though the internet has witnessed a sustained increase in adoption rates in Africa,
with penetration rate currently marked at 9.8% and more than 268 million active users across
the continent 10. Many organizations are still oblivious to what has been termed the ‘digital
divide’, a situation in which many parts of the population, even in other African developing
countries, do not have access to basic computing tools, such as desktops and broadband
Internet access, let alone more sophisticated social networking tools.
Moreover, the adoption of information and communication technologies and Internet

access continues to expand in Africa. But due to the rapid growth in other developing
continents, a digital divide between the Africa continent and the rest of the world exists, and the
gap continues to grow. Barry et al. (2008) examined 2007 Internet survey results from 21
African universities. These universities were located in Algeria, Benin, Burkina Faso (2
universities), Cameroon, Congo Democratic Republic, Republic of Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia,
Kenya, Liberia, Libya, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa (3 universities), and
Uganda. The results indicated the best connection was 2megabits/s for an Internet access to
the outside world, while the worst ones were of dial up at 56kbps. “Broadband capacity has
probably quadrupled, in the last five years”, said Obi Asika11, the founder of Dragon Africa, and
as well CEO of Storm 360, a major entertainment company in Nigeria. Obi Asika credited most
of the increase in Internet access in Africa to the arrival of new and better mobile technologies.
“Mobile internet access is now really what the key driver is” he said12. But Asika considers the
main articulation for the acceptance and adoption of social media in Africa as gruelling to
identify. Such acceptance can be traced back to the early chat rooms, Nairaland13, a Reddit-like
online community founded by Nigerian Seun Osewa in 2005.
A decade ago, most Africans would have never thought that an individual could bring a
multinational corporation down to its knees in just 140 characters. But in June 2012, Japheth
Omojuwa, an economist who eventually became a prominent Nigerian political advocate and
social media personality, went to battle over his iPad lost on a flight with Arik Air, Nigeria’s
largest indigenous airline, which he won. The battle is similar to David fighting Goliath, where he
used a simple and underestimated tool, by initiating the ‘#ArikWhereIsMyIpad’14 trend from one
of his social media platforms - a Twitter account with over 100,000 followers. This caused other
Arik Air passengers sympathetic to his plight in using the same hashtag (#) to narrate their own
previous and current experiences of losing valuables onboard Arik Air flights. The resulting
social media campaign damaged the airline’s reputation and ultimately led the company to
suspend its Twitter account. Eventually, Omojuwa became more popular online because it
became such a dominant campaign on social media. Even though sometimes the best way to
deal with disappointments is to accomplish one in another, where Arik Air might have initiated a
marketing strategy with the outburst on twitter. Many airlines now refuse to be involved in social
media as a result of the row with highly profiled social media users.
An exciting news to marketers is that Africa presents a thrilling environment for internet
service providers (ISP) and online advertisers, to encourage the adoption of social media
markets, where platforms such as Twitter would become established channels for serious
discussions or a place where governments and business leaders are able to engage naturally
with their consumers and citizens. But understanding the dynamics of the Internet and the way
those who use it will go a long way to aid the overall success of social media marketing. With a
population of over 167 million and over 56 million Internet users at December 2012, Nigeria is
the biggest Internet market in Africa15. Among the 125 million mobile telephone subscribers in
the country, 35 million people use their handheld devices to access Internet data services16. In
Africa, Nigeria will remain the largest internet market on the continent in the near future because
it has a large youth population (one-third of the population is between the 10-24 years age
bracket) and a growing middle class estimated at 23% (appx. 39 million) of the population by
Renaissance Capital in 2011, thereby driving internet usage on the continent with the growing
number of the two classes. For a continent, such as Africa that has gone through its fair share of
restriction and massive surveillance during long periods of rule characterized by dictatorships
and military regimes, social media is a refreshing and important tool towards its market and
economic stability. According to Tolu Ogunlesi, a renowned Nigerian journalist and political
commentator who quoted that in the early 90s, the government took control of almost
everything, but now social media has changed everything17. This is because people have been
able to speak up and pursue causes against governments, as mobile phones and social media
platforms were one of the key factors that enabled and encouraged the countries to unite and
protest. Social media become a powerful tool for political and social causes obvious in Egypt
and Tunisia during the Arab Spring and during the 2012 Occupy Nigeria protests. But few
African businesses and brands have also taken note of the communicative power and increased
reach of what social media can give them.
A growing question on the minds of people all over the world now is that since
‘#BringBackOurGirls’ has become a worldwide social media cause advocating for the return of
nearly 300 kidnapped girls, can it actually help, or is it destined to become another
‘#Kony2012’? The ‘#BringBackOurGirls’ campaign has obvious parallels with ‘#Kony2012’, the
well-intentioned but ultimately ill-conceived campaign launched by California-based NGO
Invisible Children18. The ‘#Kony2012’ campaign video outlined the organization’s goal to stop
the Ugandan militiaman and cult leader, Joseph Kony, whose Lord’s Resistance Army recruited
child soldiers, and it clearly resonated on social media, becoming the most viral video of all time.
‘#BringBackOurGirls’ merely started with a number of individuals in Nigeria tweeting to raise
awareness in the hope that the international community would eventually take notice of over
200 abducted girls in a region. A few days later, it had exploded around the world, with an
incredible time-lapse map of how the hashtag went viral19, and more than a million tweets have
been sent with the hashtag, including those sent by Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama, a host of
highly profiled people all over the world.
In the traditional world of retail, a South African firm, Urban Hilton Weiner, created one of
the world’s leading social media campaigns of 2013 where they gave visitors to their store a $10
coupon, only if they tweeted a selfie of themselves trying on clothes and used the hashtag
#urbanselfie20. The campaign helped the retailer get more people into its stores and increased
visibility for its merchandise across social media platforms.
Currently, Jumia is the leading e-commerce business in Africa, with operations in Nigeria
(Africa’s largest economy), Kenya, Egypt, Morocco, and Cote d’Ivoire. Social media networks
now generate 20 percent of Jumia’s daily traffic21. “Because e-commerce was a new idea, we
needed a platform that would spread the word quickly, where people would hear and learn
about it quickly, so we used social media to do that”22, said Opeyemi Adetomiwa, one of the
online retailer’s media representatives. He further explained that at their inception, people were
not aware of e-commerce but through social media, they were able to increase traffic and
awareness about the brand, thereby increasing their sales too. Other e-commerce start-ups in
Africa such as Konga23 and Kaymu24 have also adopted the social media marketing strategy.
Despite Africa’s relatively low Internet penetration, these commercial markets are now
competing with brick-and-mortar retailers on the globe.
In contrast, financial institutions such as First National Bank (FNB) – one of South
Africa’s largest banks, and Nigeria’s Guaranty Trust Bank are also rolling out technology-driven
services through social media. Guaranty Trust Bank, arguably one of the best-known brands in
Africa and one of Nigeria’s larger banks, have adopted and leveraged the use of social media
networks to reach out to potential customers. In 2013, the bank launched its social banking
platform, which had open access to services such as opening and managing an account via
Facebook25. Likewise, South Africa’s FNB exploited the widespread usage of Mxit, a South-
Africa-based instant messaging network with over seven million active users 26 . The bank
partnered with Mxit to push FNB Moola+, a fusion of its eWallet solution and Mxit’s mobile-
money offering.27
“We were very happy to see more brands and companies making use of Twitter in
Africa,” said Kamau to Forbes, whose research seeing brands like Samsung, Adidas and
Magnum using the platform to reach consumers, showed how the hashtags #SamsungLove,
#Adidas, and #MagnumAuction were some of the most popular for Samsung South Africa’s
Twitter account (@SamsungSA), that has more than 100,000 followers28. Reports indicated that
English is the most commonly tweeted language, followed by Arabic and French, but Zulu,
Swahili, Afrikaans and Xhosa were also in the top 1029. These are languages African marketers
need to embrace in other to engage people with their products and sell them something, to
avoid market campaigns that consumers might never see, not understand, or not engage in the
products.
Great consumer reaction to social media marketing has made organisations cautious of
using these social platforms to efficiently manage their brands. “Now it has created a new
approach in the advertising industry,” said Abasiama Idaresit, managing director and founder of
Wild Fusion, a digital agency with operations in Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya30. Abasiama Idaresit
further noted that active engagement through social media platform is more appealing over
static, traditional or undirectional forms of advertising in marketing. Now, the user or consumer
has a voice, and they can talk back to the people talking to them, which is the core of social
media. Also, consumers tend to use social media as a way of sourcing for more information
about brands. For example, everyone mounts up on twitter to complain when the electricity goes
out in Kenya, and same thing happens in Lagos, i.e. it is becoming a conventional way of
speaking to corporations, and also for such corporations to listen in to conversations in other for
them to know what consumers are thinking about and also what some of the concerns they
have around different brand issues are.
But many firms in Africa are terrified at the thought of an on-line (social media)
conversation about them or their products. Instead, they prefer to abide with the old form of
marketing such as television advertisements, where there are no 15 second delay to catch
criticism or insults. Majority of the firms sees the power granted by the open communication as
a major barrier for them to accept the digital divide and engage in social media, with fears of
listening to every consumer complaints of their brands, which can easily go viral, thus leading to
reputational damage, since a tweet from the smallest village in Africa against a corporation can
ricochet around the globe in less than five minutes.
The recently concluded FIFA World-Cup 2014 in Brazil has made it clear that the world
of sports has genuinely established a place in social media, as game statistics and updates are
now shared and discussed with Facebook friends and also tweeted live to followers31. Several
funny picture compilations of fans, athletes or videos of goals and coaches reactions are shared
countless number of times. Even selfies of athletes were continuously distributed to their fans
through the use of their personal social media channels32. This new connectivity had taken FC
Bayern München to greater heights. For example, the club has 17 million fans on Facebook
alone33. In total, the Bavarians have over 800 million contacts on all of their digital channels per
month34. Social Media also provides the athletes with new ways to portray themselves, as
evidenced on their twitter, Instagram and Facebook accounts, whereas fans appreciate these
gossips and continue to share and like these posts with so much enthusiasm. The selfie from
Lukas Podolski with German Chancellor, Angela Merkel received over 500,000 likes and was
shared from his site almost 50,000 times35. But his 6.7 million Facebook fans are rather few in
comparison to the sites of other soccer stars, with the likes of Mesut Oezil who has 23 million
fans alone. Even a combination of their fan base fades off in comparison to the number of
Facebook fans of super stars like David Beckham’s (45 million) and Cristiano Ronaldo (with 101
million), over the population of great countries such as Germany, Italy, and France).
To call attention to 101 million friends and Facebook likes in marketing terms, Ethiopia
population is estimated to about 86.6 million in 2013, according to the nation's official
statistics36, or even a total combination of South Africa, Gambia, Libya, Togo, Rwanda, and
some other African countries37. Also, 101 million is more than a combined population of Canada
(35.15 million38) and Australia (23.53 million39). Even though majority of Ronaldo's likes might
emanate from spambots or marketing sites, 101 million is a number that is difficult to overlook.
This shows how social media is a global sensation, to attribute Cristiano Ronaldo's popularity on
Facebook alone as a result of a decent reflection of his international celebrity status, as well as
a social media marketing strategy aimed by sponsors such as Nike and Adidas to heighten
soccer kits sale.
Social media is undoubtedly having a major impact on nations, in terms of politics,

culture and commercialism, with its new culture of ‘nakedness’. Through social media,
information has become more accessible than ever before. Mere citizens are becoming political
campaigners, advocates and journalists. Market brands are being held to account by
consumers. Social media is transforming areas such as journalism, creative writing and even
graphic design. Users and product market design considerations now include flexibility for social
media distribution. Online networking and instant access to celebrities and governments have
increased rapidly. Several lives have been saved through crowd-sourced donations for
emergency medical treatment and live updates during natural disasters, such as the Malaysian
flight MH17 news that was first heard on social media platforms before any other media
coverage. Even regional elections have become more open and transparent with citizens who
monitor them with mobile phones and social media in Africa, precisely in Nigeria.
Yet, accepting the digital divide in marketing for firms is more difficult in a new age
where the customer seems to be a king that has a larger territory, as seen on popular social
media sites such as Facebook and twitter. Contemporarily, commerce is no longer restricted to
the exchange of goods and services. It now proves to be a relationship where brands are held
accountable, not just for what they did or the impact they made but for what they failed to do as
well. That has led to the common fear among firms in adopting social media in Africa business
environmnent, which is that people will go negative. Although social media is not just for the
processing of complaints, but a tool for positive feedback, for consumer insight, corporate
promotion, general relevance, and promotion of understanding. Product marketing firms are
now like political candidates, where their brands must constantly seek our votes like politicians.
To a large extent, we can now determine their fortune by the vote of our opinions on social
media.
Furthermore, social media marketing is about understanding how technology is making it

easier for people to connect socially with their social networks and how your business can profit
from that understanding. All of this is has been made possible by social media, as social media
is changing the way businesses and customers relate, with better engagement in areas from
customer relations to entrepreneurship, marketing and development. Its impact on the African
economic rebirth has been beyond belief. According to a report by Mckinsey & Company written
in 2013, titled ‘Lions go digital: The Internet’s transformative potential in Africa’, which places the
African continent’s iGDP (or internet contribution to GDP) at $18 billion40. Also, according to the
2014 “Emerging Nations Embrace Internet, Mobile Technology” report by the Pew Research
Global Attitudes Project41, which places approximately 78 percent of Internet usage in Africa for
social media.
This sets a good foundation for Africa’s social media marketing industry, with the internet
estimated to contribute a minimum of $300 billion to Africa’s GDP by 202542, social media
marketing could contribute almost $230 billion out of the estimated $300 billion to Africa’s
remarkable growth by then. Therefore, the audience, especially marketers need to adopt this
vision too if they are to conquer social media and become its next big story. How then can the
channels of social media be leveraged to create a solid business strategy that will contribute to
business growth, and customer engagement or sales, support new industries, companies and
ultimately build brands in Africa’s very fragmented markets, would be emphasized in the
following section of this project.
Footnotes:
1
CNN - http://edition.cnn.com/2014/01/24/business/davos-africa-mobile-explosion/
2
http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Documents/statistics/2014/ITU_Key_2005-
2014_ICT_data.xls
3
www.internetworldstats.com/stats1.html
4
http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/
5
http://thenextweb.com/africa/2011/11/07/mobile-tipped-to-grow-60-in-africa-passing-1-billion-
subscriptions-by-2016/
6
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/05/internet-use-mobile-phones-africa-predicted-
increase-20-fold
7
http://www.operasoftware.com/archive/smw/2008/09/index.html
8
http://www.statista.com/statistics/218352/number-of-mobile-connections-in-africa-since-2007/
9
http://youtu.be/r57ElfW2FG4
10
11
http://techloy.com/2011/08/18/obi-asika-talks-about-role-of-mobile-in-africas-entertainment-
future/
12
future/
13
http://www.nairaland.com
14
https://twitter.com/hashtag/ArikWhereIsMyIpad?src=hash
15
http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats1.htm
16
http://www.budde.com.au/Research/Nigeria-Mobile-Market-Insights-Statistics-and-
Forecasts.html
17
http://www.premiumtimesng.com/opinion/159100-internet-will-put-nigerian-government-
shame-tolu-ogunlesi.html
18
http://invisiblechildren.com/kony-2012/
19
http://t.co/qwbnHpZlZC
20
https://twitter.com/hashtag/urbanselfie
21
http://www.humanipo.com/news/40121/social-media-generates-20-of-daily-traffic-jumia-
nigeria/
22
http://petentia.blogspot.ca/2014/02/jumia-reveals-drivers-of-online.html
23
http://techmoran.com/konga-com-wins-social-bakers-award-crosses-1-million-likes-on-
facebook/
24
http://nigeriacommunicationsweek.com.ng/e-business/social-media-influence-consumer-
buying-behavior-kaymucomng
25
http://gtbank.com/media-centre/gtbank-in-the-news/14-media/press-releases/342-gtbank-
introduces-social-banking
26
https://www.fnb.co.za/ways-to-bank/mxit-moola.html
27
http://www.bizcommunity.com/Article/196/78/110008.html
28
http://www.forbes.com/sites/rahimkanani/2014/04/23/new-research-reveals-how-africa-
tweets/2/
29
http://www.portland-communications.com/publications/how-africa-tweets-2014/
30
http://www.emergingstars.com/success-stories/abasiama-idaresit-puts-nigeria-global-
marketing-map
31
http://www.cbc.ca/sports-content/soccer/brazil2014/superfan/
32
http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/photos-sochi-2014-winter-olympics-are-selfie-
hotspot-for-athletes-and-fans
33
https://www.facebook.com/FCBayern
34
http://www.fcbayernmunich.com/us/
35
www.instagram.com/poldi_official
36
http://www.csa.gov.et/images/documents/pdf_files/nationalstatisticsabstract/2012/2012%20POP
ULATION.pdf
37
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_African_countries_by_population
38
http://www.statcan.gc.ca/tables-tableaux/sum-som/l01/cst01/demo02a-eng.htm
39
http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/Web+Pages/Population+Clock?opendocument#fr
om-banner=LN
40
http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/high_tech_telecoms_internet/lions_go_digital_the_internets
_transformative_potential_in_africa
41
http://www.pewglobal.org/2014/02/13/emerging-nations-embrace-internet-mobile-technology/
42
http://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/dotcom/Insights/High%20Tech%20Internet/Lions
%20go%20digital/MGI_Lions_go_digital_Full_report_Nov2013.ashx
Social Media Integration
2.0 The Business of Social Media

For the marketer, the digital seismic shift in marketing communication has created a
tactic into the most elusive of markets. Pete Cashmore, CEO & founder of Mashable.com once
said, “We are living in a time when attention is the new currency. Those who insert themselves
into as many social channels as possible look set to capture the most value”1. From that, it is
beyond doubt that times are changing. The predominant way to obtain information about a
company or a brand was by engaging openly with a retailer or merchant in the past years. The
major focus of marketing was on brand building and awareness, using traditional mediums of
PR, mass advertising, tradeshows, and the print media. Also, direct mail and cold calling were
the only means of targeted interactions that usually result into marketers overhaul of all
prospects - new or old, to another division for follow-up.
The arrival of Google in 1998 led B2B companies to turn towards search engine
optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and also email marketing in order to push
traffic to their websites. Also, companies created information contents that included
whitepapers and webinars to convert that traffic into leads to follow-up. But few marketers
realized that their leads were often sent too early to sales. Nowadays, marketing by using SEO,
PPC, and email still play a vital role in the marketing mix, but social media sites covers a
significant fraction of B2B communications on the web. Among the many relationships that
social marketing give rise to, businesses can embark on a shift from their default company-to-
buyer marketing model into a peer-to-peer influence model. Social media is the ideal platform to
create those effective business relationships that fosters engagement and sharing. To make the
best use of these business relationships, marketers need to establish a business strategy that
inculcate social media in every areas of their marketing plan.
In July 2012, a famous Korean rapper whose name was Park Jae-sang, otherwise
known as PSY released a song titled ‘Gangnam Style’. The music video for this song featured a
compelling horse-riding dance routine, which was uploaded to YouTube. Surprisingly, even
though there was little or no investment in advertising and marketing of this video, it went on to
become a viral sensation that got millions of audiences all around the world with its melodious
tune and compelling dance moves. By the end of 2012, the Associated Press made a valuation
that PSY and his team had made over $8.1 million in global revenues2 with the ‘Gangnam Style’
music and video. Here, Social media had conveyed a Korean product and passed it across
several language barriers, giving it access to a covetable revenue stream beyond its local
market in Korea.
Evidently, social media brings forth a surge of innovation and entrepreneurship. As the
Internet expands across Africa, it has significantly inaugurated a starting role for the new age of
digital entrepreneurs. For example, Nigeria alone has two major online retailers, Konga and
Jumia3, while Paga4 is gradually becoming a key player in mobile payments, and Jobberman5
has developed a digital marketplace for job seekers and employers. moWaza6, a startup in
Mozambique, has created a more businesslike tactic, using a smartphone application and text
messaging to locate and post available taxis to dispatch parcels and goods from wholesalers or
manufactures to retailers and individual consumers. By now, it is obvious that traditional social
media offer a wide range of opportunities for several business divisions. Generally, this is true
for social media (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010), as well as specific applications like virtual social
worlds (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2009), micro-blogs (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2011a). For example, social
media is seen as a powerful tool in producing viral marketing phenomena (Kaplan & Haenlein,
2011b), as seen from the PSY (Gangnam Style) example, while supporting new product
launches (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2012). Moreover, mobile social media differs significantly from
traditional social channels. Next, this research discusses broadly how companies can choose
the right social media and channel, and make use of their specific characteristics in different
areas of marketing, communication, and relationship development.
2.1 Organizational Structure and Social Media

Fesenmaier & Wang (2004) insisted that ‘since people can surmount time and space
and be present anywhere now, therefore, marketing organizations should certainly adopt and
embrace this new space of virtual communities. The specific ways by which marketing
organizations constitute their organizational structure and presence on these online
communities varies from one another. Leibrich et al., (2008) innovation model presented five
adopter categories of social media, which are the ‘pioneers’ (2.5%), ‘early adopters’ (13.5%),
‘early majority’ (34%), ‘late majority’ (34%), and ‘laggards’ (16%). A good example can be drawn
from a post that could be configured to appear only to those who have structured their social
media accounts to Portuguese as their language or only those who have their location setup to
China.
But who specifically should be responsible for managing the marketing organization
social media efforts. Various insights into how and what the marketing organizations opinions
holds on social media can be obtained from their understanding of the specific roles that should
be associated with managing a social media strategy. In spite of organizations that are currently
trailing and implementing social media strategies, Gretzel & Yoo (2008) found that their
management executives are most often not supportive or disagree to adopting new
communication technologies. Also, a report on VisitBritain indicated that in an effort to reflect the
organization’s commitment to social media, the marketing department employs seven people,
where three of them make up the digital team (Terry, 2002).
In some organizations, the employee who manages Facebook is being referred to as

Community Manager, while Terry (2002) described the job title as similar to digital marketing
titles. In an organization, the management and development of social media are not the official
responsibilities of any particular position, especially in Africa online startups such as Jumia7 and
Nairaland, and not limited to the positions within their marketing department. Any social
communication effort mostly would get assigned to whichever employee is comfortable with and
interested in social media. This simply means that any employee who really likes technology or
seems to be active on his or her social sites would end up being assigned the social media
responsibilities, even if the individual does not know how to link the organizational markets to
these platforms. Every successful organization thus require someone’s whose primary
responsibility deals with managing an integrated social media marketing plan for their
organization. The role is not limited to posting feeds on these networks alone but monitoring
them all the time, as old news are often ignored by consumers and not read. Some marketing
organizations low activity can be justified and explained through their acceptance of social
media as a market communication strategy, and merely lacking the employees or qualified staff
to manage their efforts to promote this activity. Few Africa firms see the management of social
media in a marketing role. Therefore, the transference of duties involved with managing social
media contributes immensely to a predominant mission in an organization structure.
2.2 Choosing the right Social Media Channel & Tactics

Social marketing provides massive opportunities for B2B companies with a goal to
power new business and increase their revenue, but cannot be possible until the company
implements and develops a solid foundation and possess an adequate knowledge of what the
social world entails and make it work. Even after a careful implantation of a social media
marketing strategy, it still requires daily or yearly visits in order for it to be successful.
Currently, small and medium businesses (SMB) are being faced with big competition in
every industry and field. The small and medium businesses definitely need to apply peculiar
marketing strategies to be able to cope with competition and gain a better standing in business,
especially against their bigger competitors. A research indicated that 80% of the urban customer
base around the world has access to online product information and consumers rely more
heavily on businesses that can be accessed easily on social media. As consumer’s interest and
lifestyle changes, it is important for businesses to maintain a presence on social media, to be
able to easily detect what prospective consumers like. Presently, social networking sites are
boasts of a huge volume of registered users from different geographical location in every parts
of the world with different medium to share their interests. Moreover, understanding consumer
lifestyles is another method for business marketers to gain advantage with the assist of social
media.
Building business contacts worldwide are some of the benefits of social networking sites.
Social media sites such as twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn provides different functions and
varying technique to keep up with the interests of users. On the other hand, Pinterest is visual-
content-centric that provides special additions for businesses that wants to gain attention from
customer with interest in visuals. Therefore, choosing the right social network or channel is a
key attribute to your social marketing plan. Below are some of the major social channels and
tools discussed in this research.
Channels Social Networks

• YouTube • Facebook
• Presentation and Document Sharing • Twitter
• Photo and Image Sharing • LinkedIn
• Q&A Sites • Google+
• Influence tracking sites
• Tactics
• Blogging
• Commenting
• Bookmarking
• Podcasting
Table 1: Major Social channels and tools.
Steinman & Hawkins (2010) suggested that the viral attribute of social media makes it
suitable for business environments. Today, advertisers have conducted their promotions
through social media mediums in order to ensure a high attention and participation by
consumers and maximize their brand exposure. Firms now try to realize their aims and goals
through social media channels (Murdough, 2009). They strengthen their bond with consumers
for an expansive audience and to encourage continuous interaction with their brand. In addition,
they try to push purchase intentions to foster consumer engagement with their web site content
and social utilities. Here, twitter is widely and most commonly utilized corporate social media
venue, but corporate marketing Facebook pages tends to have increasingly more ‘likes’ than
twitter accounts that employs ‘followers’. Different missions and usage today, drive twitter and
Facebook websites. Twitter is a good platform for firms to communicate instantly and directly
with stakeholders, while Facebook is an appropriate tool for developing communities among
firm stakeholders.
For marketers, there are many independent approaches to get the word out there about
your company or brand. These social media channels are venues to post your contacts and
encourage peer-to-peer sharing. Some of the major social channels listed above should be
taken into account by marketing organizations, because they are the power of your social
marketing strategy. Marketing firms will actively need to spend a lot of time on the four major
social network sites: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+. Although, merely posting on
these sites is not sufficient enough. The principal key is to engage and build relationships
through them in marketing practices.
In addition, a social media strategy is not only concerned with a precise understanding of
the markets and consumers alone, but as well as promoting the products. In the end, an
appropriate social media strategy can develop into more sales, and thus profits. Several
activities that include sharing products website links, product page links, promotion campaign
links, and other activities can be executed effectively on these social platforms. These activities
will draw mass attention to the business and its products, while increasing trust that results into
sales. Several studies have been conducted to affirm that social media marketing is one of the
best business success solutions. (Zarella, 2009: Evans, 2012; Mangold & Faulds, 2009; Evans,
2010; Tuten, 2008). But while it is a good idea to have a business presence on as many social
media sites as possible, marketers should avoid being too insufficient to cover and mage all the
marketing platforms.
With the many social media networks and channels available on the Internet, it is a
necessity but not compulsory to be present on all of them, but choosing the right medium of
presence is very vital to marketing success. Marketers should assess their specific brands and
target consumers before choosing which social platform to use for engagement. Looking at their
competitors’ social media sites can drive towards an effective marketing strategy to determine
specific targets, as competitors mostly have the same consumer targets. Mostly, these will be
on Facebook and twitter, thus, allowing a marketer to build a more effective relationship with
their competitor’s customers. Taking specific traits into consideration, such as social networks
that aligns more with their organizational function, are important differential factors for marketers
in implementing a successful social media marketing strategy. For instance, Sports brands
chose to be present on Facebook and twitter because this these platforms allows them to
synchronously conduct their brand marketing activities, which perfectly suits their company’s
positioning and target market, as the company aims to use these platforms to attract people
who are keen on their products (Tribe et al., 2006). This shows that popular organizations, such
as Nike and Adidas, also take firm-specific traits into consideration when deciding which social
media to use. The 2008 election in the United States is a well-known example, where the
Obama team ran a large online twitter operation asking numerous volunteers to help mobilize
voters8. Companies strategically need to take into consideration about their business goals and
use appropriate social media tools for suitable goals.
Furthermore, in order to successful run a Facebook brand page as a part of the social
media marketing mix, marketing departments needs to understand the core reasons and
benefits of why people share and communicate on these social platforms, i.e. the motivations
supporting online communications. This is as result of the interpretations that arises from social
media posts, such as the perception of a brand, acceptance of a new product, consumers’
brand features, problems relating to specific brand(s), consumer geographical locations with
high sales volume, and also generating ideas, or identifying a competition. Likewise, knowing
information on a brand page such as people’s comments and opinions about the brand can
provide a valuable input for companies initiating a social media-marketing plan. Therefore,
marketers should adopt a social media channel that supports interactive activities that includes
consumers. The topics from these interactions can be used as a feedback mechanism to
understand what sources of information need to be available to consumers and as an interactive
tool between the consumers, where consumers can answer questions posited by another
consumer.
2.3 Market Integration Models of Social Media

Business and markets encompasses different models through which its actionable plans
are resulted into goals. According to Ray (1973), marketing communications are referred to the
means by which firms attempt to inform, persuade, incite, and remind consumers about the
brands they sell. Marketing communication enables organization to have dialogues with their
consumers and can also serve as the voice of a brand (Ray, 1973). There are a varied range of
marketing communication methods that exists, that composed of all forms of promotion,
advertising, publicity, public relations efforts, personal selling, and marketing (Keller et al.,
2012).
O’shea & Alonso (2012) sees blogs, website, Facebook and twitter as the modern
marketing communication tools that can be used by sport organizations to build and maintain
relationships with their fans and stakeholders. Macnamara & Zerfass (2012) also stipulated that
social media is mostly used by organizations who have no clear objective or evaluation for it,
because of its newness. Other studies have also highlighted the importance of relationship
building through the use of social media (Tuten, 2008; Evans, 2010).
To Fisher (2009), marketing decision makers are under pressure to decide if they would
participate in the new online communications available and also request to justify the cost of
using traditional advertising tools such as TV or radio. Goode (2009) also sees social media as
a very important tool for the marketing environment. His research found that 60 percent of
planners use a minimum of 16 online leads every year using social media. He also concluded
that financial planners majorly use Facebook. Using LinkedIn, created for business
professionals, also provide information and opportunities for decision makers. Here, Fisher
(2009) also pointed out that firms are designating different purposes of social networking sites.
For example, LinkedIn is frequently used by human resources departments in organizations to
recruit and select the proper candidates to available jobs openings9. The same way organization
employees’ use ‘glassdoor.com’ to post ratings and reviews of their workplaces for service
retention to applicants or businesses10.
Understanding the categories, use, and impacts of social media applications is

mandatory for marketers (Kenski & Stroud, 2006). Marketers should be aware that engaging
social media is the most appropriate way to communicate with the upsurge amount of
consumers who spend variably most of their time online, i.e. the general public that is mostly
hard to reach with the traditional mass-media marketing methods. An additional area of social
media marketing communications that has been utilized by some sport marketing and
management scholars is sponsorship, funding, and scholarship. According to Dees (2011),
sport equipment manufacturers and other corporate entities provide sponsorships amid other
benefits to sport clubs through social networking support, since it reinforces and strengthens
their fans involvement and provides direct marketing opportunities for them. For example,
Garcia (2011) interviewed some executives from the Real Madrid football club and concluded
that the organization relied heavily on feedback mechanisms in the process of developing its
online marketing communication strategies. Garcia (2011) believed that Real Madrid’s strong
global reputation is build slightly by encouraging these positive relationships with their fan base,
which has evidently helped the club football brand to remain strong even when their team did
not perform well for a long period of time.
Several groups that communicate with each other online through social media are
beneficial for organizations because they participate in cross-selling opportunities to individual
groups sharing the same platform (Hensel & Deis, 2010). These platforms provide quick
feedback to firms, such as presenting immediate suggestions of what is needed to resolve
current issues and concerning problems. To both big and small firms, social media provides
several functions in better ways, in comparison to the traditional media. It has clearly become
the best medium to reach customers globally and receive their productive feedback. It can
provide help to both big and small sized firms in advertising their products and services at very
minimal cost, or in some cases where it is totally free and serves as a survival towards
economic recovery. Secondarily, firms do not only engage in these platforms but also utilize
them as a marketing tool, as seen from a retweet on twitter that transmits a user’s content to the
others. The story of PSY and ‘Gangnam Style’11 illustrated how social media can present
immense commercial opportunities to even the most obscure enterprises. It also shows that
commercial opportunities available on social media are not restricted by geography or language,
but by one’s imagination.
However, a lack of experience and research on the depth and effects of these
applications in Africa means that using social media as part of the marketing strategy is still an
experimental process in Africa markets. Previous theoretical efforts towards this direction was
done by Swisher (2007) who sees the effects of the social media on the enterprise media asset
management, Craig (2007) emphasized on the impact of the social media on learning
environments, and Anderson (2007) who demonstrated the organizational or commercial effects
of internet applications, hence, without linking these to specific organization marketing
objectives. Also, Bernoff & Li (2008) identified the ways that different organization departments
(sales, R&D, marketing, operations, costumer support) can support web applications, without
describing what these applications are.
Therefore, to reconcile the different stipulated approaches posed by several authors,

one needs to consider social media market integration from a dual perspective, a combination of
its applications and marketing point of view. With the different types of web applications, i.e.
email marketing, and some of the common marketing strategy objectives, two main ways of
engaging the social media as part of the marketing strategy is identified, the Passive and the
Active way.
1. The Passive way: a source of customer voice and market information.
Since marketers can collect information from reviews, comments, and opinions of
consumers, i.e. what people say online about the firm, their products and competitors
information within the social media domain. Social media provides marketers the opportunity to
translate this information into considerable ways and solution to benefit them, since people talk
a lot online. Listening to the online customer voice is important so as to learn about the users’
experiences about the company’s product or brand, identify special trends and new market
needs, or receive early warnings of problems on their brands. Such early warnings would help
the marketers to reduce the product damage with a timely recall and modification of the product.
The customer online voice can be heard through different channels such as online blogs,
bulletin boards, forums and bulletin boards and in online communities and social networks.
These customers’ experiences, product reviews, comments in forums or blogs and other forms
of customer online voice are seen to be credible by other consumers (Bates et al., 2006) and
viral sharing of customer experiences, which is a common acceptance of the social media
space, can as also lead to either success or failure of brands and products, and disrupt
marketing actions.
Also, social media market data can lead to high quality information if it is properly
collected and analyzed. The online consumer voice can provide valuable information at a lesser
cost and time than using traditional marketing methods. In other to find and collect customer
information about the company brand, several services and search engines can be utilized in
locating, gathering and analyzing the online information. Nokia is one of these firms inviting its
customers to join its online ‘Developer Community’ including discussion boards, wiki-based
applications and blogs.
2. The Active way: a means for personalizing the customer experience and tapping
customer creativity.
Several businesses are actively engaged in dialog with the customer by launching their
own corporate blogs and discussion forums. Business executives like Jonathan Swartz, CEO of
Sun Microsystems, Steve Jobs, previous CEO of Apple Computers and McDonalds Vice
President Bob Langert post daily on their corporate blogs, and thus, encouraging customers to
interact and freely express their feelings, ideas, suggestions or remarks about their postings, the
company or its products. A widely applied variant of this strategy, as initiated by Microsoft in
2003, encourage company employees to become publishers of content themselves in corporate
blogs and forums (Efimova & Gruddin, 2007). This procedure requires openness and trust of
employee capabilities from the part of the firm (McAfee, 2006). Following company-sponsored
blogs, another simple and low-cost way to engage social media as PR tool is to use content
communities, e.g. video sharing sites such as YouTube, GoogleVideo and others, broadcasting
media for distributing advertising material.
The commercials that are uploaded to these sites have the potential to be viewed by
thousands or even millions of viewers globally, or virally distributed among users at practically
no cost. Today, many companies have discovered the viral video sharing is a low cost and
effective communication medium. A good example of commercials like this is the Unilever’s
Dove Real Beauty campaign that was viewed by more than ten million times online (Deighton &
Kornfeld 2008a; 2008b) and also similar videos of the candidates of the 2008 American
elections posted on YouTube that was watched by millions of viewers. Another alternative
option for marketers is to use blogs or online communities as advertising spaces. Also, placing
advertisements in these specialized social media sites enables the very effective access of
smaller markets and very specific market segments at a fraction of the costs required by
traditional media. Similar ways to use social media applications as PR tools can be adopted
from using online encyclopedias like citizendum or Wikipedia as advertising media by publishing
company or product information there. The high rating and global popularity of such sites shows
why they appear in search engine searches such as Google.
2.3.1 Leveraging Social Media for Consumer Markets &

Communication Strategy
The most effective way of using social media as marketing communications tool can only
be initiated from the organization social media page, e.g. the organization’s Facebook page or
twitter account. Social media marketing is still in its infancy stage in over half of the developing
countries in Africa. Although, most of the online retailers appreciate its positives result on their
brand awareness and promotion, yet they are still in the early stages of adopting and integrating
it as a communication strategy for their consumer markets. For organizations willing to establish
and invest in social media marketing, it is imperative to understand why social media marketing
is a significant tool for consumer markets & communication marketing strategy and how it can
help:
• This is the age of consumer satisfaction. It is no more all about selling but more about
interacting. There is a lot to learn from the customers. By using social media, one can
identify customers, listen to their feedback and use them to improve and innovate on
organization’s product and services.
• It is not a mass advertising strategy. It can be used to identify peer groups and advertise
to that particular group. Social Media can help in identifying influencers and through
them one can guide a prospective customer into making a purchase.
• It calls for novel advertising methods, as the attention span of online junta is very low.
This is largely due to the multitasking phenomena. A person watching a video on
YouTube might be simultaneously updating a blog and reading another one scrolling
through friend’s tweets on twitter. In order to sway their attention away from distractions
the social media advertisement must be innovative and interesting to hold the
imagination and attention of the prospect.
• Also, the message must also provoke the recipient into action, like seeking a detailed
description of the product or suggesting to a friend, or even making a purchase. So, if
the advertisement is trying to sell something then it should be conveniently placed with
links so that the prospect can make a purchase with a least effort.
• And lastly, social media can be used to increase customer loyalty through customer
support services and also improve customer retention.
2.3.2 Social Marketing Communication (A 4-step Process)

In integrating a social media marketing strategy into the core organizational functions,
audience members may be more involved in the process of developing and implementing the
social marketing communication plan, as well as being involved in the desired change because
it is something they care about. Social media, if used correctly, would help organizations
increase their capacity for putting the consumer at the focus of the social marketing process.
Although social media offers many attractive opportunities, it is not necessarily appropriate for
every topic or audience. The strategic social marketer evaluates the potential benefits along
with audience characteristics and the ongoing commitment required to ensure that he or she is
ready to truly engage with the audience.
This four-step process for incorporating social media as part of an overall social
marketing strategy is adapted from Bernoff & Li (2008) P.O.S.T. model, an acronym that
represents People, Objectives, Strategy, and Technology. The use of this model assumes that
the organization is interested in using social media for the purpose of engaging in dialogue with
the audience, making them active participants in the social marketing process.
Step 1 – People; describe the audience.
Decide which audience segment is the focus for social marketing and social media. The
organization may be reaching out to health partners, or the focal point may be community
members. Discover which social media the audience members’ use. For example,
organizational polices may limit health partners’ access to social networking sites at the
workplace, though they may access them at home for personal use. Adults aged 18 to 33 years
are more likely to watch videos and use social networking sites compared with people older
than 55 years (Zickuhr, 2010). Next, find out how the audience members are using social
media. Are they writing original content and posting it on blogs, social networking sites, or other
platforms? Do they read reviews but never write one? Are they likely to leave a comment on
another post? Or do they just observe others activities but do not contribute? For example,
adults with a social networking site account may “like” a company’s page to be eligible for
discount coupons, but there is no sharing of information with other customers or exchanging
ideas with the organization. Obtain the answers to these questions about social media use
during the social marketing formative research process, before investing time and effort into a
strategy that may not be consistent with audience preferences and program goals.
Step 2 – Objective; write down the purposes for wanting to engage with the audience.
Bernoff & Li (2010) suggest five reasons that represent strategic thinking about how to
use audience members’ interest and expertise to advance products and services. The first
purpose is to listen to the audience for feedback and insights about products, services,
behaviors, or the organization. Social media provides additional methods for collecting these
data without time and geographic constraints. This purpose fits well with fundamental social
marketing principles that emphasize the importance of formative research and understanding
the consumer prior to making any programmatic decisions. For example, the Red Cross uses
social media to identify what people are saying about their organization (Briones, et al., 2011).
The second purpose for engaging the audience is to encourage the audience to talk to
their friends and acquaintances about the organization’s products or services. People using
social media naturally share ideas and experiences with one another. This purpose can expand
existing promotional efforts by increasing word of mouth communication by making it easy and
convenient for people to talk about services and products. For example, an organization that
provides relatively inexpensive images or art works, may post messages on the social media
channels that advices the audience to get their paintings from them. Posting messages such as
‘Don’t talk, just show this to her to tell her how beautiful she looks’ provides a personal mind
engagement and calls the audience to action, to purchase a painting from them.
The third purpose drives word of mouth communication by utilizing the loyal and vocal
supporters as influencers by inviting them to become official advocates for products and
services. Time and collective effort are required in order to be able to monitor social media
conversations in identifying these individuals. According to Conroy & Narula (2010), these
advocates are can be expected to share information, provide recommendations, influence other
people to do the same, thereby increasing the demand for an organization products and
services. For example, a governing body in an institution may realize that a student always
respond to other individual students complains in twitter, especially if the student has more
followers on his/her. Such student would make an exemplary perfect advocate.
The fourth purpose make conditions of providing a medium for audience members to be
able to provide support for each another. Customarily, this includes increasing the customer
service process by allowing the audience to answer questions that is posted in online
communities, such as forums. For example, Fox & Purcell (2010) study found out that people
who have diseases such as cancer are more like to accept involvement in creating contents in
blogs and online forums that would help others in ways to live with their disease.
Lastly, recruiting members to contribute to the cause and solution of a problem are ways
to get them involved. Generally, audience share information and insights into the cause of a
problem, and also what steps should be done to provide a solution to that problem and avoid it
re-occurrence. For example, many smartphone users share their insights on the iPhones, how
the glass casing breaks easily at an easy drop, and what could be done to prevent this damage
to the phones, such as using aluminum bodies for the next iPhone. Sometimes, they go to
lengths to discuss how much they are willing to pay for it. Organization, such as Apple can
engage these audience to assist in creating the solution by using social media to obtain
suggestions, organize contests, and reward people who participate in the contest and provided
they best solutions. The Starbucks’ website has a ‘My Starbucks Idea’12 page where customers
recommend new products and can also vote and discuss on the ideas that other users have
posted online.
Step 3 – Strategy; outline a specific strategy to engage the audience and accomplish the
purposes identified in Step 2.
People use social media to stay connected in their relationship. The organization must
define reasons or create benefits for the audiences that are connected with them. In other
words, what they stand to gain. This strategy shows what steps, such as rewards, the
organization is going to do to make sure that the information exchange is mutually beneficial
and sustainable. These prize, award, or honor may be intrinsic or extrinsic. Intrinsic rewards
include personal satisfaction that shows an individual is a top contributor to website or brand,
thereby increasing a brand rating. Extrinsic rewards can be honors, products and service
discounts, or prizes gotten from contests. For example, Dropbox provide every user with 500
megabytes of storage space if the refer other users to signup and install Dropbox on the PC,
tab, or phone.
Also, firms should understand the policies and procedures that guide content sharing
and distribution on social media; standards for ethical conduct, especially for a firm that wants to
increase the number of the user or followers. For instance, they must understand how to
respond to awkward messages and question posed by consumers that has the potential to
destroy their image or brand.
Finally, the marketing firms show plan how to evaluate and measure the successful
implementation and growth of their social media marketing strategy, steps in accomplishing their
purpose should outline a plan for how it will evaluate the growth rate. Popular metrics include
measuring the outreach (e.g. number of members - followers or subscribers), impressions (e.g.
number of retweet, visits, views, likes), engagement (e.g. number of replies, comments, sharing,
downloads, ratings or reviews posted), and also behavioral analysis (posts and comments,
related to questions and sentiments).
Step 4 – Technology; choose technology.
At this step, the firm chooses the technology and social platforms to use, based on the
audience preferences, such as what social media platform they use frequently, and how they
use it. Starting or developing a new application to conform to the firm’s needs of implementing a
social media strategy may ne disadvantageous, with relation to cost, for example, creating a
mobile app. Therefore, it is more beneficial to identify an already established application or
community to join and start a conversation. Conducting researches on the current new trends
are also important. To Waters & Jamal (2011), the biggest challenge in social media application
in organizations is the creation of content. Integrating social media in marketing strategy
requires content that is being shared to the audience. Successful contents are those that truly
engage the audience in conversations, sharing opinions, or dialogues with the firm, i.e. the
contents need to include relevant topics that are meaningful and useful to the audience.
Ideally, social media integration in marketing communications creates a productive and

long lasting model for consumer involvement in a firm marketing operation. However, this can
only be accomplished if marketing firms strategically know how to engage their audience into
each step in their social media marketing initiative. Furthermore, a careful integration of this
approach can ensure that consumers and marketers become more effective partners and, as
well increase the participatory culture of product and brands development.
2.4 Aligning Network tools in Marketing Practices

Social media related activities formulate most of today web activities, as most web
pages on the internet now include get-tagging features to share information. A social media
approach includes the different ways by which users can interact with one another online,
including activities like commenting or creating blogs and sharing contents or communicating
with friends via social networking sites like twitter, Myspace, or Facebook. When new members
join such a site, they typically create an online profile page, which captures specific information,
such as age, gender, hobbies, that allows them to easily get in touch with other members like
email or instant message. To Hensel & Deis (2010), there is a wide array of social media
networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn, as well as social sharing sites like YouTube and
Flickr. From the point of marketing research, this provides an opportunity to help create a brand
via community of customers with personal similarities and their comments within the site that
can be valuable. One approach within the market research has been created for communities of
users for a product or service (Hardey, 2010).
Furthermore, Wring & Ward (2010), social media is one type of online media
accelerating communication like conversation in contrast with conventional media that doesn’t
allow readers to participate in the creation of contents. According to Grier et al., (2010), social
media is ‘CRM for millennia’ but not a just simple marketing tool and its form may be different in
the future but it’s not going away. According to McKinsey’s report for the firms using social
media points out that the more firms network, the more successful they become on the long-run
benefits due to gaining from multiplicative effect of it. This is because the more the firms learn
as being highly networked; the better they perform (Shearman, 2011).
2.4.1 The A.I.D.A Framework
The ability to influence the thoughts and actions of large groups is an advantage
marketers are willing to pay a king’s ransom to preserve. The A.I.D.A framework for influencing
behavior change remains schematic for many marketers. The A.I.D.A framework (awareness,
interest, desire, and action) lends itself to the social media landscape in a fast changing digital
world. Recruiting influencers on social media had become a key task that is only tempered by
matching the right influencer to the campaign at hand. Choosing the right influencers on twitter,
Facebook or Instagram fast tracks the success of awareness generation, interest development,
and stimulation of desire to purchase brands and patronize services.
For those with a limited vision of how far network tools can be aligned into marketing
practices, social media can be deployed, using it only for the first 3 elements of the A.I.D.A
framework, leaving out the action. Taking action via social media (usually purchase decisions)
has been slow to catch on but there are many outliers in the African space. A strong
commendation goes to a brand like Guaranty Trust Bank, which has created an application that
allows users to set up a bank account and transact business from within the Facebook
environment13. In Africa, Mi-Fone has reportedly sold more than a million inexpensive mobile
devices across the continent14, and Rekindle Learning, a South African startup, is developing a
personalized and interactive learning tool, that does not require the function of smartphones, but
can easily work on simple mobile devices15. Also, there could be the first means of an effective
content aggregation on the continent, with the likes of iROKOtv16, a modern delivery platform
that delivers locally produced content, such as videos.
As a matter of fact, success stories like IROKOtv and Mi-fone are attracting global
investors and venture capitalist as a means of investment. Technology Incubators are also
materilizing across the continent, with examples from the Kenya’s iHub, South Africa’s JoziHub,
to Cameroon’s ActivSpaces. Two notable innovation hubs produced in Nigeria are the
Wennovation Hub and Co-Creation Hub (or CcHub)17. Recently, Microsoft signed and
announced a partnership with three leading African incubators18 as a means to support startups.
Many African businesses are not primarily focused on the local opportunities they could get from
their business, but focused more on what they could derive from the international level, as seen
in Jumia19, and KISUA20, that is, local businesses using the internet and technology such as
social media to gain access to customers and their suppliers globally. For example, Jumia and
KISUA now ships products internationally. Parry & Tyson (2008) study shows how the Internet
Advertising Bureau UK (IABUK) research found that over 80% of consumers today are more
persuaded to buy a product due to its presence on social media. Clearly, this shows that having
a presence on social media is a crucial marketing initiative for a business because of its
massive reach to potential consumers and its ability to help a business gain purchase interest.
2.5 Cautions in Integrating Social Media into Marketing Practices

As noted earlier, many marketers are risk adverse and experience has taught them to be
reticent about consumer-generated media due to their inability to control the message. In one
instance, pharmaceutical manufacturer Johnson & Johnson released an online marketing
campaign via an online video about pain relief for women who carry their babies in a sling.
Within hours, Twitter and the ‘blogosphere’ exploded with negative commentary about the
video21. In over a single weekend, the volume and sentiment of the consumer-generated media
brought down a well-planned advertising campaign (Baker 2009).
Related to the source credibility issue, another hurdle for marketers is that customers will
consider information if it is both useful and believable, but will react badly to sales-push
messages that violate social networking’s intrinsic qualities of socialization and trust (Angel &
Sexsmith 2009). Making social networking sites overly commercial is risky, as users might turn
away from the site if they feel their interests are being subjugated to those of advertisers; a
warning issued by analysts to News Corp when it acquired MySpace, shifting it to a mass-
market advertising platform giving brands the opportunity to both advertise and also interact with
the website’s users (Datti & Carter, 2006). Similarly, creating fake blog entries is another
example of how the misuse of social media can irritate consumers and harm brands. The now
infamous ‘Walmarting across America’ fake blog came under severe criticism online after the
ethical breach was exposed (Burns, 2008).
The size of online communities is also a factor in the limitations of social media on
generating online WOM. Many marketers are born in an era of mass marketing and are driven
by the prospect of large and often hard to reach audiences viewing their campaigns.
Paradoxically for these marketers, for online groups to be effective, there needs to be a finite
size to each community. The concepts of ‘reach’ and ‘mass media’ need to be reconsidered and
new emphasis needs to be placed on focused ‘customized’ marketing campaigns. For social
media campaigns to be effective, the new commercial imperative shows that marketers need to
belong to a large number of groups or communities. This recognizes that both the cultural and
emotional relationships are paramount (Phillips, 2008), suggesting the need to continually
monitor and truly belong to these forums rather than be mere onlookers.
Firms that uses the traditional marketing methods, e.g. TV ads, radio, surveys, usually
spend lots of money to locate a target market. Integrating social media in their marketing plans
would allow them to see where specific target groups or potential consumers are located.
Searching for groups on Facebook and using social bookmarking sites, such as Reddit or Digg,
to determine total links to their site, to know where potential consumers are located. A
successful implementation of a social media marketing plan requires certain rules to be
followed. These rules, but not limited to, are as follow;
• The company should not proceed to implement a social media marketing initiative
because everybody is doing it. It might not provide the best outcome or expected result,
based on the different products types, industry, purposes, or if your consumers are
frequently online.
• SMM requires a long-term goal and strategy. It should not be expected to yield results
overnight, is it requires long commitment.
• Starting a social media marketing plan does not other marketing plans can be abolished.
Instead, inculcate them to work together.
• Don not go into social media marketing unless you are ready. You need objectives,
goals, and commitment.
• Do not be afraid of social media because of its open end to consumers and determining
if it is effective or not. There are several ways to measure its market impact. Besides, the
brand awareness and visibility you can achieve through it will impact your bottom line.
• Do not merely create social profile and pages and believe that is all you need to do. You
need to create a social presence with your brand that communicates with your target
audience and builds relationship with them.
For firms to implement social media marketing, they need to determine if it fits into their
action plans. An advantage in social media marketing is that the tools can be customized to a
firm’s precise need, as there are several social media tools with different functions and modes
of communication. Therefore, efforts can be concentrated on other forms of marketing while
waiting to see the results from social marketing initiatives.
2.6 Successful Metrics of Social Media Integration

Some marketing companies do not accept and adopt using social media because they
do not know how they could measure its outcome, return on investment (ROI), on their
marketing efforts. According to Fisher (2009), the ROI within social media has long been a
major barrier, and seems likely to become ever more so, with the equally lightening spread of
both social media use and savage budget cuts. Marketers are faced with daily pressures on the
impact of their marketing initiative, and the success of social media efforts are very often
extremely difficult to measure. Therefore, social media metrics used. These metrics are broad
and they include audience size (e.g. number of followers), reach (e.g. viral impact), engagement
(e.g. number of comments), sentiment (e.g. consumer response) and outcomes (e.g. resulting
traffic, conversions)’ (Schetzina, 2010).
Furthermore, Fisher (2009) noted that social media often requires qualitative
measurements, something with which online marketers are typically neither comfortable nor
familiar. Several studies identified the three key areas where social media marketing efforts are
evaluated. They include the audience size, the rate at which consumers engage, and their
sentiments (Fisher, 2009). Most organizations measure the impact of their social media efforts
by the total number of likes and followers they receive and they rate at which they increase over
time. Setting goals, such as to gain an additional 10000 fans on Facebook within an interval
time, are among goals I included in many social media marketing plans. For twitter, they are
concerned with the total numbers of followers or retweets.
This suggests that even organizations comfortable with social media are primarily
focused on growing numbers to increase their brand awareness and maximize their reach.
Social media advantages include something that people can use and interact with others
regularly in their daily activities, with respect to any size of the audience. The social platforms
allows the audience to become get more closer with their preferred brands and provides them
with up-to-date information on the brands. Measuring engagement is also important in order to
understand what is successful versus what is futile.
Interacting with consumers can also be very beneficial for organizations. Using this skill
to build a strong online community that is loyal and trustworthy is vital to maintaining and
supporting positive messages about the brands via social media. The next chapter of this
research emphasize on the factors involved with participation and engagement on these social
media marketing platforms.
List of Tables
Table 1: Major Social channels and tools.
Footnotes:
1
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/OPINION/10/28/cashmore.online.privacy/
2
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/cashing-gangnam-styles-youtube-fame
3
http://www.premiumtimesng.com/business/155211-exclusive-nigerias-foremost-online-
retailers-jumia-konga-at-war.html
4
http://thenextweb.com/africa/2011/09/15/paga-aims-to-bring-mobile-money-services-to-
millions-of-unbanked-nigerians/
5
http://www.jobberman.com/about/
6
http://williamjamesfoundation.tumblr.com/post/55258363230/2013-entrepreneur-stories-
mowoza
7
http://businessdayonline.com/2014/10/jumia-konga-adibba-olx-ride-on-social-media-for-
growth/#.VHW-bIvjtUQ
8
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/10/08/technology/campaign-social-media.html?_r=0
9
https://business.linkedin.com/talent-solutions/products/work-with-us
10
http://theundercoverrecruiter.com/glassdoor-employers-salaries-interviews/
11
http://www.forbes.com/sites/hughmcintyre/2014/06/16/at-2-billion-views-gangnam-style-has-
made-psy-a-very-rich-man/
12
http://mystarbucksidea.force.com
13
http://gtbank.com/normal/socialbanking.php
14
http://www.cp-africa.com/2012/01/13/the-mobile-economy-in-africa-talking-the-next-500-
million-with-mi-fones-nic-regisford/
15
http://www.rekindlelearning.com/page/learning-solution/
16
http://irokotv.com
17
http://www.mercatornet.com/harambee/view/12000
18
http://news.microsoft.com/2013/10/24/microsoft-enters-into-cooperation-agreements-to-
accelerate-african-innovation/
19
http://www.jumia.com/
20
https://kisua.com/
21
http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2008/11/17/jj-gets-caught-in-a-sling-over-internet-motrin-ad/
Participation & Engagement in Social Marketing Communities
Participation & Engagement in

Social Marketing Communities
According to the Barnes et al. (2008) research, a direct principle is necessary for
the appropriate use of social media, that informs marketers of the social media means
available to them, and how they can engage in a positive and supported communication
for their brands. This research encourages principles that guides the transition of the
existing marketing culture and patterns, building and maintaining trust, ensuring
transparency, and developing a continual communication. Several principles influence
social media marketing, and every company’s goal in the social media sphere should be
dedicated to these principles even though social media marketing activities can assume
many forms. These principles include community, the content, conversation, and
transparency (Jaffe, 2008; James, 2009). Each of these four principles plays a major
role in supporting the implementation and effectiveness of social media marketing.
Social media would not exist without a conversation. Constructive conversations
requires transparency, and social media needs content in the information exchange
process, thus leading to a community. Also, without a community, the content
interchange would not be relevant.
Social media communities are created and developed when groups of people
come together to exchange ideas, share knowledge, and support each other. With this,
communities exhibit three distinct behavioral characteristics. They include;
• Advocates of Promotional measures – the members of a marketing community
serves as promoters and backing for brands associated with that community.
Members of a community act as evangelists for their group by recommending
their product and services to the mass audience and other members of the
groups.
• Link and relationship building - community members tend to have connections
with others individuals and members in different communities, that posses the
same similarities with them, and usually make contacts with them when help are
needed.
• Reputational status – some members of the community are commended as

experts in their area of specialization. Such members are known for their ability
and skills, and are accredited with a good reputation. They usually have a large
circle of influence that they might have acquired from their experience over a
long period of time.
Without only these certain characteristics, communities often fall apart and diminish.
The successful creation and implementation of marketing communities’ by marketers is
subjected to trust. This is because members within a community trust each other and the
communities they belong to itself as a result of the shared knowledge and skills that exist
within the group. Shared knowledge and systems in a community enable the weak ties
within the community connect with the stronger ties. Moreover, communities impose
some rules or follow certain approach to knowledge sharing. Sometimes, the
communities may contain special interest groups that function in a certain way. For
instance, a company might have a stream of products with their brand, e.g. Sony
Walkman, Sony TV, Sony MP3 players. Sony Corporation can adopt the use of special
interest group and communities for their TV users than those that have their Walkman1.
This shows and demonstrates the effect of connections in a community. As
people who connect with each other within a community can share information, to
increase brand awareness than traditional push marketing. In addition to the power of
connections and crowd sourcing, social media communities provides a powerful voice.
The freedom derived from this two-way communication from the application of social
media can create problems for marketers. Now that the brand message is entirely in the
hands of the consumers and not the company, and this can become a difficulty.
With the major shift in communication practices in the modern age and the
number of corporations that have adopted social media for their marketing strategies in
Africa, this marketing and communications medium is no longer a first-mover strategy.
An additional advantage of market communication to build support for social media is
cost savings. Blogs are platforms that are free of charge, and are significantly below the
costs of more traditional marketing techniques such as a commercial on TV or
newspapers. According to Readon (2009), companies’ budgets are much lesser in the
current economic recession and therefore marketing may receive more attention than
ever before. But in order to do it well, firms need to remember that the most effective
marketing campaigns are those treated as a long term, strategic and effective
communication tool, i.e. those that are committed to participation and continuous
engagement.
3.1 Modifying consumer behavior and market decisions

The principal role and involvement of consumers in market purchase decisions
and management of brands has changed over the years. A company can no longer
passively fulfill their brand promise and marketing messages out to the consumer
(Bernoff & Li, 2008). There has been a change in trend through the development of new
technologies, the consumer’s role in knowledge and behavior, and a shift in purchase
power as a result (Ferguson, 2008). Previous research sees social media as something
businesses can no longer ignore in an information age (Castells, 2010; Fuchs, 2007;
Qualman, 2012). Today, consumers’ thoughts and opinions about their brand
experience, which is being shared online, influence other customers’ perceptions about
the brand (Barnes, et al., 2008), and as well as impact their purchase intent (Lee &
Kotler, 2008).
Barnes et al. (2008) research shows quantitative data that support the notions of
changing consumer behavior. To Ratnantunga & Ewing (2005), the consumer now
demands a higher and more personal interaction with the company that leads to the
development of a brand experience. As a result of this, the demands generated from the
changed consumer needs, technological and societal changes shows that organizations
have to keep pace with these changes and begin to develop new ways of operation
(Ratnantunga & Ewing, 2005). Consumers’ request for a personal, interactive, and
relational experience in markets has become apparent from the several opportunities
that have been made possible through improved technology.
According to Hawkins & Mothersbaugh (2009), firms are committed to the total
observation of the changing needs of the consumer. Firms now want consumers to use
their websites and networks for a variety of purposes, and also explicitly in obtaining
product specific information on a regular basis. This is a major form of building
relationships between the firm and their consumer (Hawkins & Mothersbaugh, 2009).
Also, Ratnatunga & Ewing (2005) suggests that companies must currently see the
consumer as a partner in the marketing and communication process, and also be
involved in the needs and expectations of every individual who would prefer a closer and
personal experience. To Popcorn (2005), the current trends have allowed consumers
reject the forced default top-down traditional marketing and now prefer a personal
conversational experience. Also, Hawkins & Mothersbaugh (2009) confirmed that
corporations use social media marketing to develop brand stimulation, which can also be
referred to as a vivid extension of word of mouth. Previous research sees more and
more consumers find their information online. These research includes the findings from
Barnes et al. (2008) who examined 320 respondents and concluded that more than 70%
of them posses and engage in online search and behavior sometimes, with Bickart &
Schinler (2001) who agreed that purchase decisions are most strongly influenced by
online factors such as search engine results, discussion forums, online rating systems,
reviews, and blogs.
Moreover, even though social networking sites, micro-blogging sites, and
YouTube did not seem so influential, they are seen in research and survey results as an
actual source of information attainment (Barnes et al., 2008). 95% of the surveyed
respondents accepted that their decision to purchase a brand was solely based on their
own customer care experience (Barnes et al., 2008), hence, market engagement with
consumers on social media. Similarly, a high number of the consumers surveyed see the
experience of others, commonly sourced from information that was found online and
through knowledge sharing, as a major influence on their brand selection (Barnes et al.,
2008). Even the famous technology company, Apple Inc., when at its best, refuses to let
technological capability drive their customer experience. Steve Jobs, the previous CEO
at Apple Inc., would say repeatedly: You have got to start with the customer experience
and work back towards the technology – not the other way2. That has led to several
successful rollouts of new devices at Apple, as they always tend to improve on their next
product based on their consumer experiences.
3.2 Social Media as a Participatory Culture

Developing a marketing strategy for community and conversation leads to an
engagement concept that institutionalizes how social media can be used to bring brand
advocates into a consumer and partnership marketing campaign. A marketer sees the
importance and impact of conversational marketing, seeing how competitors gain
advantages over them by using online community tools. Hence, this question begs the
current marketing culture if it adopts a two-way, or push–pull marketing strategy and how
they plan to promote their brands.
Participatory culture is a term that is mostly used to designate the involvement of

users, consumers, audiences, and fans in the creation of content, and thus leading to a
culture. Practical examples includes the joint editing of articles on Wikipedia, uploading
of images to Facebook, Instagram or Flickr, the uploading of videos to YouTube
channels and, as well as the creation of short messages of 140 characters on Twitter or
Weibo. Participatory culture model is generally opposed to the mass media and
broadcasting model, which is atypical of newspapers, radio, and television, where there
is one sender and multitude recipients.
According to Gil de Zuniga et al. (2008), social media represents an expression
towards a participatory culture. Gil de Zuniga et al. (2008) defined a participatory culture
as a culture in which fans and consumers are invited to participate in the creation and
circulation of contents (Gil de Zuniga et al., 2008). Also, it involves participants’
interaction with each other. Participation involves new forms of contribution and
collaboration (Jenkins et al., 2006). Based on Lévy (1997), those who accept and adopt
a participatory culture merge resources and combine skills so that collective intelligence
is seen as an alternate source of media power.
Therefore, this research defines a participatory culture as one:
1. with low barriers to expression and civic engagement,
2. that adopts a good support for creating and sharing with others,
3. a community that consist of members who believe that their contributions matter, and
4. that includes members who feel some degree of social connection with one another
(Jenkins et al., 2006)
With the rules associated with a community and participatory culture, a company
should focus its online marketing efforts on building a social media community. Several
elements constitute this notion, with the most important being that social media
marketing is about connecting and linking with groups of people. A major emphasis is on
connecting individuals with similar interests, as social media tools enable likeminded
people to find each other. To Barefoot & Szabo (2010), this is a key benefit of social
media marketing. Besides, marketing firms are more likely to have success by targeting
specific online communities instead of focusing on general groups on the web.
According to Hunt (2009), an important part of building a community is the role of a core
customer. Therefore, instead of finding communities that already existed, a marketing
firm can also build an online community specifically around their products, service, or
even themselves
However, the digital age had reduced markets down to an even more personal
size because people now publish their preferences explicitly on online social networks.
Our need to communicate virtually with each other has led to a massive explosion of
internet applications, designed and formulated to help us connect and communicate. But
in order to for marketers to function effectively in today’s technology obsessed world, it
requires a clear understanding of the effect that web conversation has had on
consumers, and the way they now communicate with the web. Despite the rapid
expansion of the web and uses of internet that affects the way users interact with
websites and companies, firms need to understand how to take advantage of this form of
interaction to develop a social media marketing strategy, chose an appropriate means to
implement a participatory culture, and also how to manage the communication.
3.2.1 Managing the online conversation

Most of us probably ignored people when they say the negative things in
conversations. Sometimes, we simply allow them to continue their gossip and just walk
away from them. What if we decided to join the conversation and gossips to transform it
into useful information? The same is applicable to social media. People are usually fond
of saying negative comments about a company or brand online, leaving marketing
managers with two choices: to ignore the conversation, or to participate in it. Leaving
and ignoring such conversations either leaves no good as others would join in less time,
and issues becomes unmanageable.
Previous research indicates how consumers’ positive experience with a brand

leads to invitation by others (Barnes et al., 2008). Likewise, negative experience with
your brand leads to invitation from consumers that might eventually result in the failure
and closure of that brand. This shows the potential of consumers’ experience on your
brand, based on social media community factors and in the power of the Internet
Publishing Content in Online Communities

With respect to the content, a firm can be seen as the publisher in social media
marketing. Since social media are tools used to facilitate the creation and distributions of
brand contents, marketing firms are faced with the challenges of deciding what kinds of
content to create and, the purpose of the content they create. Safko & Brake (2009)
emphasize on the four elements of social media marketing strategies. These elements
are the four ways companies can engage online communities: education, entertainment,
communication, and collaboration. That is, companies can use content to communicate
with their audience, encourage collaboration with or among their audience, educate, or
entertain them.
Furthermore, Marzano & Scott (2009) highlights the importance of a company
investing significantly into publishing creative content; content that draws people’s
interest and encourage them to share it with their friends. To Weinberg (2009),
marketing firms should adopt to making contents instead of advertisement. Also, people
would ignore the content if it is boring.
3.2.2 Market Communication Strategy
Communication strategy emphasize on the main reasons of using social media to

communicate with the audience in a two-way system. While the social networks and
technical strategy matters, the participation and communication strategy that comprises
of the content and conversation plays an important role to build a community to reach
brand goals and increase awareness.
Starting to listen
Here, marketing firms should spend considerable time to collect information about
the audience before they embark on a customer engagement strategy. This approach
can be communicated to their staff since they are the first line of representatives to
consumers, so that they can also become online advocates of communication. Adopting
social marketing communications strategy in the firm staff approach to engaging with
customer should be part of the values of the company. At inception, the goals set needs
to be realistic, flexible, and also focused on customers’ needs and wants. At certain
intervals where theses consumer needs changes, the company goals should also
change to accommodate these needs.
Involvement in conversations
By principles of conversation, the company is a participant in social media. With
the interactive nature of social media, company should initiate online conversations and
engage online communities related to their products or services. This communication
does not mean they should engage in total advertisement and promotion. Instead, they
can provide information to consumers by posting productive tips, answering questions,
or making friendly comments.
Driving customer engagement

Social marketing has been in existence since the early 1970s, when Kotler &
Zaltman (1971) applied commercial marketing principles in order to sell products and
services that develop societal and individual health. It employed the 4Ps concept of
marketing, which are product, price, place, promotion, and market research, exchange,
target audiences, and segments.
The 4Ps are commonly referred to as the marketing mix. Here, the product
extends beyond the basic market process of selling tangible product items to include
services, behaviors, and policy changes. Price is seen as to what the consumers must
do, or give up to get a product. Examples include money, cognitive effort, or time. Place
refers to the location or platforms in which individuals make their decisions,
communicate or exchange information. Promotion in social marketing appeals to the
consumer’s emotions and provides them information, e.g. beneficial messages, with a
goal to get engage them for longer duration of time.
A key component of driving engagement in marketing results from branding, such
as brands like Coca Cola3 and Nike4 did. Branding is used for social media marketing
promotions to promote engagement and increase participation. Currently, commercial
marketers are taking advantage of the growing digital market for their promotions to
drive engagement in the social media space. For instance, Canon (2012) indicated that
there were over 1.3 trillion display ads on Facebook in 2011. Social media marketers
should follow these trends, with respect to the wide reach of the digital market.
According to Lefebvre & Bornkessel (2013), another area of social marketing that is
already embracing customer engagement digitally is health. Other similar approaches to
drive consumer engagement by marketing firms in social media communities include:
• Increasing demand - Information fuels itself as it provides motivation. Increasing
the thirst for knowledge among your community audience keeps them engaged
within the community, with information that they would likely find difficult to obtain
externally.
• Grow awareness – Marketer should make sure that the consumers are kept in
the picture with information pertaining to their brands or products. Consumers
may not have the time or opportunity to discover all the importance of a product.
Informing them about it in every possible way, and promoting the message
regularly by asking them questions to interact and engage.
• Demonstrate value - social media can be used to demonstrate the value to
customers before or after they might have purchased your product. This could
come in form of after-sales support, customer care, to foster interaction, and help
provide dialogue within the community.
For companies to preserve their brand and maintain its availability in the markets, it
is vital to retain a good lasting connection with the customers. Several ways to do this
exist from being available and accessible from different community platforms, but the
Dell Company showed leadership with different innovative ideas. The Dell company
boast of other community innovations, by creating a micro-site called IdeaStorm5, which
encourages comments about their wide array of products, in addition to their financially
successful Twitter accounts and aliases.
Dell has a lot of Twitter accounts that keeps increasing day-by-day. Currently,
they stand at more than 90 accounts. Although, having many Twitter accounts can lead
a social media campaign to become a mess. But for Dell, it is not the case. Many
principal stakeholders at the company tweet about their daily activities and what they are
currently working to achieve, starting from the company chairman and CEO, Michael
Dell, to other support staff like @Stefanieatdell6. Today, Dell continues to gain advocates
on Twitter because they do not only tweet about exclusive promos. A major goal of the
company’s massive network on Twitter aims to keep the conversations about their
products and brand endlessly. Their success lies on the engagement with their
customers on a personal and human level, as users are now able to have direct
conversations with Dell on important issues, that appeals to customer satisfaction,
product reviews and quality, and facilitate pre and post sales processes. The logic
behind this idea is that Dell customers will be able to complain directly to Dell, rather
than have them complain on other sites to provide ease accessibility to the complains
and work to fix them quickly. Although, this logic do not stop customers from complaining
on other sites, but it enable Dell itself receive the complaints directly by listening to their
customers, and also gather ideas for improvement on future products.
3.2.3 Cultivating Advocates & Social Content Strategy

Having an online presence provides permission to people to talk about your
product, and also creates a means to connect with your customers by joining the
conversation. Being part of the conversation also allows you to influence that
conversation, change consumer beliefs and perceptions, and create advocates for your
brand. But how can a marketer connect with an audience after joining a conversation to
encourage them to connect with their networks or brands require a strategic plan. This
plan and set of activities must be structured into the company’s marketing plan, with a
goal to connect and communicate effectively with their audience. They include;
Transparent in community participation

The transparency principle insists that a company should be authentic in its
participation with social media. According to Weinberg (2009), the rules are different
when it comes to engagement in social media marketing. An online relationship provides
means to facilitate your cause and helps develop real relationships. Marketers that are
involved in social media marketing should surrender to complete transparency in all of
their online dealings. Refusing to adopt transparency, they might ruin their marketing
campaign and isolate themselves from the communities who feel they have been lied to.
Consequently, marketing firms should focus on engaging consumers in online
communities by creating persuasive content to share with them, and participating in the
several online conversations, while being transparent in every part of their online
activities.
Influencers and Communities

Communities have existed with face-to-face interactions since humans lived in
groups. Marketers can still create a brand new community from scratch if they need to
for their brands. Today, communities exist everywhere, including inside and outside
businesses. There are now groups of like-minded people usually who come together for
a short intervals to support a good cause. Some include charity foundations, social
communities to support good cause, such as poverty. Also, there are some groups of
people that majorly spend their time in helping others on user forums. There are also
communities that share information and articles of interest, together with links to
interesting topics. There are specific groups of people who are solely dedicated in
helping to expand knowledge storage on the Internet by creating articles such as the
input of content on Wikipedia. Such groups of people do not expect rewards for their
contributions and actions. This stipulates that there are several people who are open to
such contribution such as developing a community. Therefore, marketers need to find
the right people in the community through which they can channel their message and
brand promotions to the rest of the audiences7. On social media platforms, a brand
retweet from the president of the United States to attest to its authenticity would
influence others about such brand and its usefulness.
Connecting and Engaging with the audience

The communication between marketers and the consumers associates with
strategic principles and guidelines in order to encourage free flow of information.
• First, marketers need to realize that their traditional marketing cannot be
replaced by their social media marketing and community engagement
approaches, as traditional marketing involves a timed and controlled message
delivered in a passive way.
• Secondly, social media marketing plan mainly utilize some forms of digital
conversation and brings a two-way communication into their marketing efforts by
involving the voice of the consumers.
• Marketing firms with sustainability goals should use these social platforms to
listen in at first before choosing to sell. They should act like accumulators of
information and provide content, instead of applying ways of traditional
advertisement.
• Lastly, a new trial product usually provides valuable feedback about the brand
through user reviews and comments, even before creating the final product. This
feedback design can be used to improve and drive the design of final product,
which would be more attractive to the consumer.
An additional advantage of using community creation and engagement to market a
brand is authenticity. Consumers respect and appreciate the interaction with the
company. They respect and cherish an organization that listens to them. To the
marketers, the derive value from having the direct connections with the consumer. This
role is generally fulfilled by the PR spokesperson in traditional modes of marketing,
where specific information is being passed across to someone to make sure that the
correct brand message is communicated to the audience.
Also, people tend to engage in social communities that can provide social
contents and updates that are relevant to their passions, family, friends, or location.
Besides, interesting and informative contents are factors that support social media
marketing campaigns and success. Prior to engagement in the social media space,
marketers need to plan how to provide interesting content on a regular basis in order to
attract and retain attention from its audience, which can be referred to as the
fundamental principles of the content strategy. Colon (2012) believes that new marketing
is about the content that is being created, the time of its release to the target audience,
and through which medium it is released. Colon (2012) identifies five steps for creating
an effective content strategy in this phase of social media marketing, which are:
1. Developing content - should be based on the channel used to engage with the
audience and not created based on the audience. Marketers need to think about
their audience as a niche needed to interact with specifically, not as a large
group of people. Good content should be taken into consideration on which
platform it is shared or published, with more focus on its format. For instance,
Photos, Videos, or games can be used but people prefer to share videos
differently depending on the social platform.
2. Using information - Marketing firms should not predict what their audience wants.
They should be able to create content within short intervals to share with their
audience, while adopting a participatory culture. Consumers usually do not like
brands that push adverts to them without creating an avenue for information
exchange on feedback and reviews, as this build trust and confidence with the
advertised brand.
3. Exclusive messages - Messages that is being passed to the audience should
consist of content that people will talk about. Consumers do not want to be sold a
product and forgotten about in a short time, but wants a product that would drive
a conversation. For example, the smartphone companies compare themselves
with each other as the competition increases. Marketers must talk and show their
brands in ways that they can be thought as leaders with higher-level functionality,
and not simply like every other competitive brand.
4. Content overload - some marketers produce loads of content and shared
information with their audience8, then launch a new campaign on a product and
forget the previous content shared on their website or social properties, leaving
them unmeasured and with no maintenance. Now, marketers have tools and
motivation to create and maintain content shared with their audience, such as
different social media metrics of measurement 9 . E.g. total number of clicks,
followers, likes, etc. Above all, contents should lead to conversion, which comes
as a result of engagement. As engagement comes from good content shared.
5. Language of Communication - an important consideration for marketers to
implement a content strategy in their social media marketing effort deals with the
language of communication. However, it is easy to say that using a popular
language, such as English, would benefit all and get the message to a wide array
of audience. But this is not beneficial to brands that need to expand globally.
Some organizations now employ multiple language use on their sites by creating
different websites in different languages, e.g. manutd.com now offers 7
languages, including English, French and Arabic 10 . Therefore, a bilingual
approach can be considered as the best method. But in rare cases that the
medium requires the use of only one language, marketers can adopt using the
primary language of their brands target audience.
3.3 Brand Communication Continuity and Value Capture
Continuity ensures that a brand message is properly portrayed in different ways

so that consumers can continue to engage with the brand. Marketing goes beyond just
online efforts. It also includes everything offline, from the brand logo, name, business
materials, cards, and sales materials. Continuity helps to bring consumers from different
point and locations without losing communication and understanding of the brand
intended message. Therefore, marketers should adopt a communication process that
accepts continuous messages of their brand in order to ensure continuity in the social
media community.
Influencers can also impact the continuity of brands communication11, with their
connections in getting a message out on the marketers’ behalf. Influencers such as
popular top executives and celebrities often retweet interesting news information on
Twitter, and sometimes even share links to your marketing blogs from their own social
network profile or blogs. Sometimes they follow market trends on twitter and Google+ or
even like your useful post and links on Facebook. The sets of activities across their
social profile rebroadcast and increase your message audience by showing its values,
thus leading to your brand communication continuity.
Consumers’ contribution & Control

Social media marketing as a process that works from a personal perspective.
This lay emphasis on the individual participants first before the primary business interest,
a marketing shift from an advertisement to a personal profile where commercial ventures
is being replaced with a human face. With personal desires to join a social group is the
willingness to interact with others to discuss important issues and also contribute to the
conversations. Sometime this requires you to share personal information about yourself
such as gender, which areas of work you belong, your hobbies or what you do at your
leisure time. After a while, you begin to engage in certain conversation that is similar to
your area of interest or specialization, with your connections (Arai & Pedler, 2003). With
respect to efficiency and center of attention, social media marketing produces the best
brand awareness, relationship building and personnel marketing strategy. Its new wave
of interactive applications and connectivity has become a part of the internet that creates
access for consumers and the general audience to contribute and control some of the
content on brand websites. Examples include user reviews, comments and customer
ratings.
However, social media encompasses the creation of a conversation, such as,
inviting users’ comment on a shared content or information. Although, comments on
shared information does not create a community, it brings an organization of people’s
understanding with a common interest. In most cases, social media can be used to
develop a community with the same interest, but social media network or platforms and
community are two separate subjects. Therefore, brand value capture and
communication continuity requires marketers to identify the best ways that they can
leverage social media to develop means through which their customers are able to
respond to their marketing campaigns or brands. Using social media applications to
engage consumers can lead to low marketing cost12 and high probability of consumer
engagement and retention13. Community comprises of five outstanding features that
provides values to marketers and the audience, as listed below.
• Stability: usually derived as a result of core members who interact and share
information over a lengthy period of time.
• Typical: members of a community become part of the community because they
share the same interest or have he same intent on specific goals.
• Dialogue: interactions with and between each other in the community, related to
brand issues, and sometimes may develop into the main topic for discussion for
the entire community.
• Exchange relations: sometimes, communities include different set of activities
such as topics and discussions that involves specific members engagement.
• Dedication: this arises from interactions and engagement over a period of time,
hence, creating motivations to participate more often in the community.
Every social media marketing initiative should include all of these features, as it
provides a progressive marketing strategy for marketers that frequently require time,
participation, and engagement to produce results. As this communication strategy
encompasses a personalized form of marketing, marketers need to identify and select
the networks for their marketing campaign with adequate consideration of the time
required to interact with other members, to recruit advocates to build a community for
their brand markets.
3.4 Social media and Viral Awareness

A good idea to generate marketing success is to think about network effects.
People are used to assembling where their friends are, with respect to location, what
they should buy especially if their friends recommend it, and as well try to use the same
products that their friends uses. This idea can be referred to as the crowd effect, and
social media applications and marketing needs to be designed with crowd effect. In
January 2010, several news channels reported on the accumulation of snow in the
United Kingdom, which eventually started a crowd effect started on Facebook. Over that
period of time, Facebook had started to present status updates that consisted of only
one or two words, such as ‘black’, ‘dirty grey’, ‘tartan’14. These status updates had
different meanings to the audience until word got out that the posts was all about
underwear and the specific colors to be worn that day. The crowd effect of these
updates was to support breast cancer awareness, which led to other Facebook groups
and fans that supported the awareness. Some fans even posted images of themselves
wearing these colors on their individual and group pages. According to the Susan G.
Komen foundation for the cure of breast cancer 15 , their Facebook updates had
increasingly surge their Facebook fans from 134,000 to 142,784 and still counting. A
spokeswoman, Andrea Rader said ‘We’re so delighted. We think this is just a

phenomenal example of how powerful the Internet can be in getting this message out’16.
Another recent example of a global cause and awareness to get help and
assistance that circulated on social media was the ALS ‘Ice Bucket Challenge’ campaign
in 2014. The ALS ‘Ice Bucket Challenge’ can be regarded as the latest in a list of
unexpectedly viral phenomena that transpired all around the world. This list includes, but
not limited to, the ‘Will it Blend? – Glow Sticks’17 video campaign on YouTube; Dove –
Real women; Real rewards18, Grumpy Cat19, Lay’s ‘Do Us A Favor’20, Bathroom spray
deodorizer Poo-Pourri who describe a sweet smell of success with their hit viral video
"Girls Don't Poop"21; and Gangnam Style22, one of the most fascinating and unrepulsive
dance ever. Regardless of such an impressive list, the Ice Bucket Challenge proves
distinctive among several awareness campaigns. Its participation is as easy as filming
yourself dumping a bucket of mixed ice and water over your head, posting the video on
any social media channel, and also challenging another person to do the same, in order
to raise awareness for the ALS - Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis disease, otherwise
known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. The ALS awareness raised over $115 million in
donations23.
Besides having such a huge amount of money to support their cause such as
finding a cure for the disease, they have also produced immeasurable awareness about
the deadly disease to different audiences all around the world. With these examples,
marketer should learn the major dynamics of social media and viral awareness to
leverage as a power of influence in their marketing campaigns. Considerably, there are
five major objectives learned from the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. They are:
• Personalize Participation
People participate in competition and in different challenges all over the world to
support causes for improvisation. Although, everybody might not like or prefer the
mode of participation, but yet, would like to participate to support a good cause.
Therefore, the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge allowed participants with two separate
ways to participate. Either dumping loads of ice water on your head or just
directly donating to the cause works. In reference to marketing techniques, giving
or allowing your audience in more than a single way to make inputs and spread
your brands. Nowadays, with the recent advancement in technology, some
students still prefer a paperback to an ebook. For example, a brand campaign
that is mostly directed to teenagers would find Facebook repost and twitter
retweet easily to share the information, than emailing links to friends and
contacts.
• Power of Peer Pressure

Nobody likes a challenge or wants to be challenged, especially if it involves a
task that could easily be done. The ‘challenge a friend’ concept is another major
reason behind the campaign success, as many participants can easily post their
videos to their social media profiles such as Facebook and twitter, where they
can use Facebook tagging feature and twitter mentions to challenge their friend.
This mode of engagement and participation sustained its longevity, thus leading
to more donations. This shows how marketers can use several means to include
a sharing feature in their social media marketing campaigns, either by adding
share buttons, through referrals, social content and contest that includes the
participants and the general audience in the social media space. New
advancements in technology just started to implement this feature, such as seen
from the PlayStation 424 and Xbox One25 game consoles released in 2014. These
games consoles have social networking features where users can post and
update their (multiplayer) game score points and wins on social media profiles at
the end of a stage or completion of a game, to challenge others.
• Everyone Loves a Star

In social media marketing, support such as a single retweet or like from
celebrities play a pivotal role that works like a charm in brand marketing
campaigns, and this also worked for the Ice Bucket Challenge. Everyone from
the famous founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates26, to one of the greatest football
player of all time, Cristiano Ronaldo and other soccer stars took part in the
challenge27, thereby serving as an encouragement or appeal to their fans to do
the same even if they were not tagged by them. Celebrity support draws media
coverage, and in turn media coverage spread all over the world. Another means
of fun that brings excitement to people is the curiosity of which celebrity will be
tagged next and if they will perform the task. Nowadays, marketing often look to
popular names in order to attract large audiences for product. The Apple Inc.
uses Justin Timberlake 28, a world renowned songwriter, to advertise its new
streams of mobile devices, the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. Nike also uses
football start to advertise their brands29. But the true reality is that marketing do
not necessarily need a Barrack Obama to make their brand campaign
successful. To tell the truth, a famous celebrity might not make sense for
particular brand marketing, or even attract the wrong kind of attention that might
lead to the downfall of that brand30. Therefore, marketers should examine good
leaders and motivational speakers who can provide a better significance and
influence the audience towards their brand.
• Model it with Fun

Furthermore, marketing campaigns should be designed with fun. Everybody
loves fun. Camping, going on excursion trips, baking cakes, and other activities
tends to attract the audience interest. The ALS Association strategically decided
to spread the Ice Bucket Challenge at the hottest part of the year, in the summer,
when people were happily looking for ways to cool off from the hot sun, except in
places like Australia and other parts of the world who were in winter at that time.
Sometimes, people cannot wait to see their boss at work being dumped with a
bucket of ice and water in his expensive Tuxedo. Marketing campaign that
teaches fun tends to me more successful than those that are not. Examples
include the ‘Gangnam Style’31 dance and the Bathroom spray deodorizer video
‘Girls Don't Poop’32.
• Be in the history books

Lastly, the ALS challenge went viral because some people’s goals included being
part of a story, or be present in the history books, and the campaign provided an
avenue for them to achieve that. Several kids participated individually, shared the
videos with their friends, and nominated their parents, to feel that they are doing
something good, as many of them do not have money or really care about
donating. Millions of years from now, as anthropologists conduct researches
through the remains of our civilization, they will discover several strange
happenings in the YouTube video archives; millions of people cheerfully dumping
ice and water over their heads.
Although, limited barriers can be identified to participate in this campaign such as

separate individual to hold the water and phone, if the phones could record videos,
having a social network profile to post and share the video. But a motivational factor
arises from seeing everyone doing it, watching people’s failed attempts and reaction
upon successful participation, thus increasing awareness. These presents a good
example of how individual participation and engagement can be increased with the
network effect of social media marketing for good causes. Hence, brand awareness
increases and the audience becomes more encourage to participate in marketing
communities.
3.2.3 Social media marketing and community

recommendations
An important source of information that affects the adoption and use of brand
market products and services are online social networks. Social media participatory
culture, with adequate knowledge and information transfer provides current trends that
examine the influence approaches and constitute viral awareness and marketing efforts
today. Social media provides an important source of information that associates with
consumer behaviors and action. Secondly, the advent of the new media that comprised
of technological-mediated social communication provided the unparalleled capacity to
connect individuals simultaneously. Thus, increasing market accessibility to consumers,
and allowing consumers to literally connect to their influencers.
Starting a social media marketing initiative that facilitates community and
engagement requires detailed planning, coupled with a lot of thought, user dedication
and, above all, a noteworthy commitment of the marketer’s time. This is why it is very
crucial to understand the different factors needed to create a brand community or market
ecosystem, and also to make it sustainable and successful. Listening to the community
remains principal. Most successful companies, such as Dell, allows for consumer
feedbacks, with their knowledge, experience and skills, to direct their future goals (Dell,
1994). Consumers are currently out there, everywhere, talking about several products
and brands. Therefore, listening to what they are saying about a brand, products and
their experience from a consumer viewpoint is of utmost importance. Also, receiving
brands and product feedback from consumers through online conversations and
community is really important. Comments, reviews, ratings and experiences can be
negative, neutral, or positive. Besides, some are critics who influence others to become
critics like them in a community too. Without this level of market competence and
intelligence, a brand and its social media marketing effort is risky of being initiated or
launched in the wrong conduct and management.
Above all, social media marketing integrates the ability to influence a large group
of individuals, using an array of influential strategies through online social networks and
marketing communities in a compelling and pervasive way, using regular interpersonal
communications for market goals and objectives.
Footnotes:
1
https://econsultancy.com/blog/62821-how-sony-uses-facebook-twitter-pinterest-and-
google
2
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs
3
http://simplymeasured.com/blog/2014/05/22/lessons-from-coca-colas-social-media-
strategy-cohesive-campaigns-and-creative-content/
4
5
http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/19/power/ps1q14-20140179-jervis
6
https://twitter.com/stefanieatdell
7
http://www.oracle.com/oms/social-influencer/blog-matias-influence-2212093.html
8
http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/236127
9
http://blog.palmeradagency.com/social-media-marketing-how-much-is-too-much
10
http://www.manutd.com
11
http://www.convinceandconvert.com/content-marketing/social-media-influencers-
versus-brand-advocates-infographic/
12
http://www.dreamgrow.com/how-social-media-helps-to-lower-the-cost-of-marketing/
13
http://www.uversity.com/blog/social-networking-for-engagement-and-retention-case-
studies/
14
www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/6954696/Facebook-bra-colourstatus-
update-craze-raising-breast-cancer-awareness.html
15
http://ww5.komen.org/
16
http://www.dallasnews.com/lifestyles/columnists/darla-atlas/20100111-Komen-
foundation-benefits-from-Facebook-bra-7107.ece
17
http://youtu.be/l69Vi5IDc0g
18
http://adage.com/article/news/ten-years-dove-s-real-beauty-aging/291216/
19
http://www.grumpycats.com
20
http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/us-flavor-lay-launches-1-million-chip-flavor-
192908678.html
21
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKLnhuzh9uY
22
http://www.forbes.com/sites/hughmcintyre/2014/06/16/at-2-billion-views-gangnam-
style-has-made-psy-a-very-rich-man/
23
http://www.alsa.org/fight-als/ice-bucket-challenge.html
24
http://us.playstation.com/corporate/about/press-release/ps4-to-add-anticipated-
features-that-enhance-the-system-s-social-capabilities-and-overall-gaming-
experience.html
25
http://news.xbox.com/2014/08/xbox-one-system-update-september-preview
26
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/bill-gates/11039690/Microsoft-founder-Bill-
Gates-excels-at-charity-Ice-Bucket-Challenge.html
27
http://www.goal.com/en-sg/news/3884/global/2014/08/24/5056488/avb-ronaldo-messi-
mourinho-footballs-best-als-ice-bucket
28
http://appleinsider.com/articles/14/09/22/apple-again-taps-justin-timberlake-and-
jimmy-fallon-for-new-iphone-6-ads
29
https://ca.sports.yahoo.com/blogs/soccer-dirty-tackle/nike-champions-league-final-ad-
features-swarm-footballers-161624657.html
30
http://mediakix.com/2013/10/fashion-panel-celebrities-vs-influencers-wins/
31
http://www.forbes.com/sites/hughmcintyre/2014/06/16/at-2-billion-views-gangnam-
style-has-made-psy-a-very-rich-man/
32
Summary
4.0 Embracing the Social Media Change

Berthon et al. (2012) sees the 21st century has brought both opportunities and
challenges in our global, boundaryless world to information where managers face a dynamic
and interconnected international environment, leaving effective communication as the key to
success in life and business. Now that innovation and development seems to be the driving
force behind many technological advances that continue to shape business practices, from the
origination of the computers, with new communication technologies like e-mail, instant
messaging, and the Internet. They innovation provides very good news for both productivity and
quality of life (Malone, 2004), and social media (Kalakota & Robinson, 2001).
Today, marketing can be categorized into three major forms, which are; push – business
that advocate their market idea to a broad audience, pull – business that attracts customers who
are interested in their products, and engagement marketing – business who capture their
customers’ attention and take into account of what they consider meaningful and productive
through communication.
Standee (2009) sees how the ‘social media’ world emerged as a connectivity between
two or more virtual world of information, and now it is renowned for its instant online presence,
which differs it from the default means of marketing - direct or email marketing. This stipulates
that marketing through social media, as a passive means of communication, is an unavoidable
practice in organizations marketing initiatives and business generally. Globally, various brand
successes can be attributed to it, from brand communication, distribution, and the creative
awareness it brings. With these, African markets need to gain an in-depth understanding of
social media for the purposeful use in marketing, especially locally created brands and markets
with goals to internationalize rapidly. Consequently, as the nations continue to advance digitally
at a rapid pace, especially in Africa where the number of users on social networks increase
daily, either young and old, and an increase on users dependence on social networking for daily
activities such as friendship and user connectivity, means of sharing information, entertainment,
news, and above all, creating awareness for locally created brands.
As advances in technology and usage become more frequent in our daily lives and
activities, it raises questions about the future trends in marketing and businesses. What will
businesses strive to clamour to in the next decade in order to develop brands, communicate
effectively between markets with respect to location and consumer needs and want, and thus,
make more profit? If they should adopt social media, what it could change in the existing
Summary
business model, and how the social platforms might advance and mature over the years.
Revising business models and changing organizational behaviour to news ways of functionality
can be difficult, especially when it alters their mode of communication and working patterns in
this interconnected world.
In Africa, there have been several plans aimed at growth, from development patterns to
adopting new standard and technologies, in its developing countries. This is not limited to the
way markets are conducted. For examples, market negotiations and proceedings occur in face-
to-face interaction and ‘trade by barter’. Now, negotiations are being conducted with emails and
transactions are easily conducted with POS (Point of Sale) devices. Few years back in the
1990s, when the spontaneous use of mobile phones expanded rapidly in much of the developed
regions, hardly anyone would have thought of Africa as a potential market. In a little over a
decade, the continent has become the world's second most connected region by mobile
subscriptions, and has witnessed the fastest growth in mobile subscribers in the world on track
to hit one billion mobile subscriptions by 2015, according to Informa Telecoms1. Now, with more
than 629 million subscribers2, its market is larger than North America's.
According to Internetlivestats3, Africa's Internet users (more than 268 million at the end
of 2014) represent just a small percentage of the 2.9 billion people online around the world, with
the US alone reportedly having more than 270 million people use the Internet4. Within Africa,
one person out of every 10 is estimated to be an Internet user, thus making the continent the
region with the lowest penetration rate in the world. Although, many believes Africa mobile
subscription would pass 1 billion by the end of 2016, thus making it the world second largest
mobile market5. Clearly, this means African corporations are experiencing an immense shift in
marketing that involves the way of interactions and conversation, market engagement and
brand advocacy. Companies’ approaches needs to change to incorporate this, allowing their
traditional marketing methods to now include a digital marketing component, such as social
media, as part of their overall strategy. Their default push marketing needs to change and
incorporate a two-way mechanism to encourage conversation with the use of new social media
applications. This would allow marketers to integrate community marketing, learn from their
consumer behaviour to engage, contribute and urge compelling conversations with their
audience. Facebook likes, comments, rebroadcasts such as twitter retweet, mentions, and
discussion forums increase brand awareness. To Seth Godin6, word of mouse, i.e. sharing
information online via Twitter, Facebook or other social networking sites, spread faster and to
many more people, which means a potential increase in sales to any marketer.
Summary
4.1 Cultural Acceptance
Even though the adoption of information and communication technologies and Internet
access continues to expand in Africa. A digital divide exist due to the rapid growth in other
developing continents, between the Africa continent and the rest of the world, and the gap
continues to grow. But broadband capacity has probably quadrupled, in the last five years” said
Obi Asika7, the founder of Dragon Africa, and as well CEO of Storm 360, a major entertainment
company in Nigeria. Obi Asika credited most of the increase in Internet access in Africa to the
arrival of new and better mobile technologies. With respect to social media marketing, the
acceptance and adoption in Africa is as gruelling to identify, since there is an inclination for
companies to focus more on the medium of communication than the clients, for brand
marketing. This is not limited to giving the right message using the right medium to the right
audience in the right environment and at the right time. In addition, whom do they interact with,
what should they should share, and how they could to foster participation and inclusion of
clients provides barriers to its acceptance and adoption.
A decade ago, most Africans would have never thought that an individual could bring a
multinational corporation down to its knees in just 140 characters. But in June 2012, Japheth
Omojuwa, an economist who eventually became a prominent Nigerian political advocate and
social media personality, went to battle over an iPad lost on a flight with Arik Air, Nigeria’s
largest indigenous airline, which he won. The battle is similar to David fighting Goliath, where he
used a simple and underestimated tool, by initiating the ‘#ArikWhereIsMyIpad’8 trend from one
of his social media platforms. ‘#BringBackOurGirls’ merely started with a number of individuals
in Nigeria tweeting to raise awareness in the hope that the international community would
eventually take notice of over 200 abducted girls in a region. A few days later, it had exploded
around the world, with an incredible time-lapse map of how the hashtag went viral9, and more
than a million tweets have been sent with the hashtag.
Also, consumers tend to use social media as a way of sourcing for more information
about brands. For example, everyone mounts up on twitter to complain when the electricity goes
out in Kenya, and same thing happens in Lagos. According to a report by Mckinsey & Company
written in 2013, titled ‘Lions go digital: The Internet’s transformative potential in Africa’, which
places the African continent’s iGDP (or internet contribution to GDP) at $18 billion10.
Summary
4.2 Systems Integration
Nowadays, marketing by using search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC),

and email still play a vital role in the marketing mix, but social media sites covers a significant
fraction of B2B communications on the web. Among the many relationships that social
marketing give rise to, businesses can embark on a shift from their default company-to-buyer
marketing model into a peer-to-peer influence model. Social media is the ideal platform to
create those effective business relationships that fosters engagement and sharing. To make the
best use of these business relationships, marketers need to establish a business strategy that
inculcate social media in every areas of their marketing plan.
The Associated Press made a valuation that PSY and his team had made over $8.1
million in global revenues11 with the ‘Gangnam Style’ music and video on YouTube. Evidently,
social media brings forth a surge of innovation and entrepreneurship. As the Internet expands
across Africa, it has significantly inaugurated a starting role for the new age of digital
entrepreneurs. Also, in organizations, the management and development of social media are
not the official responsibilities of any particular position, especially in Africa online startups such
as Jumia12 and Nairaland, and not limited to the positions within their marketing department.
Some marketing organizations low activity can be justified and explained through their
acceptance of social media as a market communication strategy, and merely lacking the
employees or qualified staff to manage their efforts to promote this activity. With this, the
transference of duties involved with managing social media contributes immensely to an
organization social media marketing goal.
Building business contacts worldwide are some of the benefits of social networking sites.
Today, there are several social media channels available, with different functionalities. Here,
Fisher (2009) also pointed out that firms are designating different purposes of social networking
sites. For example, LinkedIn is frequently used by human resources departments in
organizations to recruit and select the proper candidates to available jobs openings13. Social
media sites such as twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn provides different functions and varying
technique to keep up with the interests of users. On the other hand, Pinterest is visual-content-
centric that provides special additions for businesses that wants to gain attention from customer
with interest in visuals. Therefore, choosing the right social network or channel is the key
attribute to your social marketing plan.
Summary
Different missions and usage today, drive twitter and Facebook websites. Twitter is a
good platform for firms to communicate instantly and directly with stakeholders, while Facebook
is an appropriate tool for developing communities among firm stakeholders. For marketers,
there are many independent approaches to get the word out there about your company or
brand. These social media channels are venues to post your contacts and encourage peer-to-
peer sharing. Prior to launching your brand on all of these engagement channels, you need to
clearly define and develop your strategy and plan. This comprehensive plan should define the
goals you want to achieve. Taking specific traits into consideration, such as social networks that
aligns more with their organizational function, are important differential factors for marketers in
implementing a successful social media marketing strategy. For instance, Sports brands chose
to be present on Facebook and twitter because this these platforms allows them to
synchronously conduct their brand marketing activities, which perfectly suits their company’s
positioning and target market, as the company aims to use these platforms to attract people
who are keen on their products (Tribe et al., 2006).
This four-step process for incorporating social media as part of an overall social
marketing strategy is adapted from Bernoff & Li (2008) P.O.S.T. model, an acronym that
represents People, Objectives, Strategy, and Technology.
Step 1 – People; describe the audience.
Decide which audience segment is the focus for social marketing and social media. The
organization may be reaching out to health partners, or the focal point may be community
members. Discover which social media the audience members’ use. For example,
organizational polices may limit health partners’ access to social networking sites at the
workplace, though they may access them at home for personal use. Adults aged 18 to 33 years
are more likely to watch videos and use social networking sites compared with people older
than 55 years (Zickuhr, 2010). Next, find out how the audience members are using social
media. Are they writing original content and posting it on blogs, social networking sites, or other
platforms? Do they read reviews but never write one? Are they likely to leave a comment on
another post? Or do they just observe others activities but do not contribute?
Step 2 – Objective; write down the purposes for wanting to engage with the audience.
Bernoff & Li (2010) suggest five reasons that represent strategic thinking about how to
use audience members’ interest and expertise to advance products and services. The first
purpose is to listen to the audience for feedback and insights about products, services,
Summary
behaviors, or the organization. The second purpose for engaging the audience is to encourage
the audience to talk to their friends and acquaintances about the organization’s products or
services. People using social media naturally share ideas and experiences with one another.
The third purpose takes word of mouth communication to the next level by tapping into the most
loyal and vocal supporters and inviting them to be official advocates for programs and services.
It will require time and effort to monitor social media conversations to identify these influential
individuals. These advocates are more likely to share information, provide recommendations,
influence others to take action, and increase demand for products and services (Conroy &
Narula 2010).
Step 3 – Strategy; outline a specific strategy to engage the audience and accomplish the
purposes identified in Step 2.
People use social media to stay connected with others with whom they have a
relationship. The organization must articulate reasons or benefits for the audience being
connected and having a relationship with the organization. In other words, what is in it for them?
The strategy should articulate what the organization is going to do to ensure that the exchange
is meaningful and mutually beneficial. Finally, the organization should outline a plan for how it
will evaluate the success of its social media strategy in accomplishing its purposes, including
developing relationships with the audience members. Possible metrics include measuring reach
(e.g. number of audience members who are followers or subscribers), impressions (e.g. number
of views, likes, visits), engagement (e.g. number of comments, downloads, sharing with others,
ratings or reviews posted), and sentiment analysis (comments, posts, tweets related to the
behavior, program, or service).
Step 4 – Technology; choose technology.
Based on audience preferences and practices (e.g., what social media they use, how
they use it), what the organization are trying to accomplish, and the proposed strategy, the last
step is to select the appropriate social media application. Instead of initiating a new social media
application, at times it may be more advantageous for the organization to identify established
communities and conversations and join the dialog. Successful use of technology requires that
the content is truly a dialogue and will engage the audience. The message content is just as
important as the social media application.
Furthermore, in order to successful run a Facebook brand page as a part of the social
media marketing mix, marketing departments needs to understand the core reasons and
Summary
benefits of why people share and communicate on these social platforms, i.e. the motivations
supporting online communications. This is as result of the interpretations that arises from social
media posts, such as the perception of a brand, acceptance of a new product, consumers’
brand features, problems relating to specific brand(s), consumer geographical locations with
high sales volume, and also generating ideas, or identifying a competition. The topics from
these interactions can be used as a feedback mechanism to understand what sources of
information need to be available to consumers and as an interactive tool between the
consumers, where consumers can answer questions posited by another consumer, i.e. as a
source of consumer voice and market information (passive way), and a means for personalizing
consumer experience and tapping their creativity (active way).
For organizations willing to establish and invest in social media marketing, it is

imperative to understand why social media marketing is a significant tool for consumer markets
& communication marketing strategy and how it can help:
• This is the age of consumer satisfaction. It is no more all about selling but more about
interacting. There is a lot to learn from the customers. By using social media, one can
identify customers, listen to their feedback and use them to improve and innovate on
organization’s product and services.
• It is not a mass advertising strategy. It can be used to identify peer groups and advertise
to that particular group. Social Media can help in identifying influencers and through
them one can guide a prospective customer into making a purchase.
• It calls for novel advertising methods, as the attention span of online junta is very low.
This is largely due to the multitasking phenomena. A person watching a video on
YouTube might be simultaneously updating a blog and reading another one scrolling
through friend’s tweets on twitter. In order to sway their attention away from distractions
the social media advertisement must be innovative and interesting to hold the
imagination and attention of the prospect.
• Also, the message must also provoke the recipient into action, like seeking a detailed
description of the product or suggesting to a friend, or even making a purchase. So, if
the advertisement is trying to sell something then it should be conveniently placed with
links so that the prospect can make a purchase with a least effort.
• And lastly, social media can be used to increase customer loyalty through customer
support services and also improve customer retention.
Summary
In addition, a social media strategy is not only concerned with a precise understanding of
the markets and consumers alone, but as well as promoting the products. In the end, an
appropriate social media strategy can develop into more sales, and thus profits. Several
activities that include sharing products website links, product page links, promotion campaign
links, and other activities can be executed effectively on these social platforms. These activities
will draw mass attention to the business and its products, while increasing trust that results into
sales. In order to successfully implement a social media marketing strategy, the following
points must be considered:
• The company should avoid adopting a social media marketing strategy just because
competitors are using it. First, preform an analysis of the current market to determine if
your brands would be suitable and benefit from social media marketing.
• Social media marketing is a long-term strategy and results are not immediate.
• It can be implemented along with other acceptable marketing strategies.
• In social media marketing, time and channel of communication plays an important role.
• Not every social media site is good for a particular brand or business. Therefore,
conduct a research which social media channel your audience frequently use and how
they prefer to absorb content and communicate.
• Avoid creating mere social pages. Instead, create a social presence that meets and
understands with your target audience to promote sharing and relationship building.
• Additionally, your brand visibility and awareness on social media will definitely impact
your organization bottom line.
4.3 Continuity
Barnes et al. (2008) emphasied that a direct principle is necessary for the appropriate
use of social media, that informs marketers of the social media means available to them, and
how they can engage in a positive and supported communication for their brands. Several
principles influence social media marketing, and every company’s goal in the social media
sphere should be dedicated to these principles even though social media marketing activities
can assume many forms. These principles include community, the content, conversation, and
transparency (Jaffe, 2008; James, 2009). Each of these four principles plays a major role in
supporting the implementation and effectiveness of social media marketing. Social media would
not exist without a conversation. Constructive conversations requires transparency, and social
Summary
media needs content in the information exchange process, thus leading to a community. Also,
without a community, the content interchange would not be relevant. Social media communities
are created and developed when groups of come together to exchange ideas, share knowledge,
and support each other. With this, communities are believed to exhibit three distinct behavioral
characteristics. They are;
• Advocates of Promotional measures – the members of a marketing community serves

as promoters and backing for brands associated with that community. Members of a
community are act as evangelists for their group by recommending their product and
services to the mass audience and other members of the groups.
• Link and relationship building - community members tend to have connections with
others individuals and members in different communities, those posses the same
similarities with them, and usually make contacts with them help are needed.
• Reputational status – some members of the community are commended as experts in
their area of specialization. Such members are known for their ability and skills, and are
accredited with a good reputation. They usually have a large circle of influence that they
might have acquired from their experience over a long period of time.
The most effective marketing campaigns are those treated as a long term, strategic and
effective communication tool. The freedom derived from this two-way market communication
requires communication continuity, i.e. firms need to be committed to participation and
continuous engagement, for a successful and effective utilization of social media marketing
initiatives. Here, firms should adopt a participatory culture that provides an opportunity towards
continuous engagement between themselves and their audience. Participatory culture is a term
that is mostly used to designate the involvement of users, consumers, audiences, and fans in
the creation of content, and thus leading to a culture. Practical examples includes the joint
editing of articles on Wikipedia, uploading of images to Facebook, Instagram or Flickr, the
uploading of videos to YouTube channels and, as well as the creation of short messages of 140
characters on Twitter or Weibo. Participatory culture model is generally opposed to the mass
media and broadcasting model, which is atypical of newspapers, radio, and television, where
there is one sender and multitude recipients. This research defines a participatory culture as
one:
• with low barriers to expression and civic engagement,

• that adopts a good support for creating and sharing with others,
Summary
• a community that consist of members who believe that their contributions matter, and
• that includes members who feel some degree of social connection with one another
(Jenkins et al., 2006)
By principles of conversation, the company is a participant in social media. With the

interactive nature of social media, company should initiate online conversations and engage
online communities related to their products or services. Since social media are tools used to
facilitate the creation and distributions of brand contents, marketing firms are sometimes faced
with the challenges of deciding what kinds of content to create and, the purpose of the content
they create. Safko & Brake (2009) emphasize on the four elements of social media marketing
strategies. These elements are the four ways companies can engage online communities:
education, entertainment, communication, and collaboration, i.e. companies can use content to
communicate with their audience, encourage collaboration with or among their audience,
educate, or entertain them. This communication does not mean they should engage in total
advertisement and promotion. Instead, they can provide information to consumers by posting
productive tips, answering questions, or making friendly comments.
Kotler & Zaltman (1971) applied commercial marketing principles, the 4Ps concept of
marketing, which includes product, price, place, promotion, and market research, exchange,
target audiences, and segments as elements to drive consumer engagement in social media
marketing communities. Here, the product extends beyond the basic market process of selling
tangible product items to include services, behaviors, and policy changes. Price is seen as to
what the consumers must do, or give up to get a product. Examples include money, cognitive
effort, or time. Place refers to the location or platforms in which individuals make their decisions,
communicate or exchange information. Promotion in social marketing appeals to the
consumer’s emotions and provides them information, e.g., beneficial messages, with a goal to
get engage them for longer duration of time. Branding is also used for social media marketing
promotions to promote engagement and increase participation, as Coca Cola14 and Nike15 did.
Other similar approaches to drive consumer engagement by marketing firms in social media
communities include:
• Increasing demand - Information fuels itself as it provides motivation. Increasing the

thirst for knowledge among your community audience keeps them engaged within the
community, with information that they would likely find difficult to obtain externally.
• Grow awareness – Marketer should sure that the consumers are kept up in the picture of
information pertaining to their brands or products. Consumers may not have the time or
Summary
opportunity to discover all the importance of a product. Informing them about it in every
possible way, and promoting the message regularly by asking them questions to interact
and engage.
• Demonstrate value - social media can be used to demonstrate the value to customers
before or after they might have purchased your product. This could come in form of
after-sales support, customer care, to foster interaction, help provide dialogue within the
community.
Maintaining a visible presence in different markets and community platforms is another way
for firms to maintain and retain a lasting relationship wit it consumers. Dell has a lot of Twitter
accounts that keeps increasing day-by-day. Currently, they stand at more than 90 accounts.
Although, having many Twitter accounts can lead a social media campaign to become a mess.
But for Dell, it is not the case. Many principal stakeholders at the company are tweet about their
daily activities and what they are currently working to achieve, starting from the company
chairman and CEO, Michael Dell, to other support staff like @Stefanieatdell16. Today, Dell
continues to gain advocates on Twitter because they do not only tweet about exclusive promos.
A major goal of the company’s massive network on Twitter aims to keep the conversations
about their products and brand endlessly. The Dell company boast of other community
innovations, by creating a micro-site called IdeaStorm17, which encourages comments about
their wide array of products, in addition to their financially successful Twitter accounts and
aliases.
Being part of the conversation also allows you to influence that conversation, change
consumer beliefs and perceptions, and create advocates for your brand. Some set of activities
must be structured into the company’s social media marketing plan in order to connect with an
audience and encourage them to connect with their networks or brands. They include:
• Transparency - insists that a company should be authentic in its participation with

social media and every part of their online activities.
• Influencers - groups of people who are solely dedicated in helping to expand
knowledge. E.g. a brand retweet from the president of the United States to attest to
its authenticity would influence others about such brand and its usefulness
Also, people tend to engage in social communities that can provide social contents and
updates that are relevant to their passions, family, friends, or location. Besides, interesting and
informative contents are factors that support social media marketing campaigns and success.
Summary
Prior to engagement in the social media space, a marketers needs to plan how to provide
interesting content on a regular basis in order to attract and retain attention from its audience.
Colon (2012) identifies five steps for creating an effective content strategy in social media
marketing communities, which are
1. Developing content - should be based on the channel used to engage with the audience
and not created based on the audience. Marketers need to think about their audience as
a niche needed to interact with specifically, not as a large group of people. Good content
should be taken into consideration on which platform it is shared or published, with more
focus on its format. For instance, Photos, Videos, or games can be used but people
prefer to share videos differently depending on the social platform.
2. Using information - Marketing firms should not predict what their audience wants. They
should be able to create content within short intervals to share with their audience, while
adopting a participatory culture. Consumers usually do not like brands that push adverts
to them without creating an avenue for information exchange on feedback and reviews,
as this build trust and confidence with the advertised brand.
3. Exclusive messages - Messages that is being passed to the audience should consist of
content that will people talk about. Consumers do not want to be sold a product and
forgotten about in a short time, but wan a product that would drive a conversation. For
example, the smartphone companies compare themselves with each other as the
competition increases. Marketers must talk and show their brands in ways that they can
be thought as leaders with higher-level functionality, and not simply like every other
competitive brand.
4. Content overload - some marketers produce loads of content and shared information
with their audience18, then launch a new campaign on a product and forget the previous
content shared on their website or social properties, leaving them unmeasured and with
no maintenance. Now, marketers have tools and motivation to create and maintain
content shared with their audience, such as different social media metrics of
measurement19. E.g. total number of clicks, followers, likes, etc. Above all, contents
should lead to conversion, which comes as a result of engagement. As engagement
comes from good content shared.
5. Language of Communication - an important issue for marketers to implement a content
strategy in their social media marketing effort deals with the language of communication.
However, it is easy to say that using a popular language, such as English, would benefit
all and get the message to a wide array of audience. But this is not beneficial to brands
Summary
that need to expand globally. Some organizations now employ multiple language use on
their sites by creating different websites in different languages, e.g. manutd.com now
offers 7 languages, including English, French and Arabic 20 . Therefore, a bilingual
approach can be considered the best method, but in rare cases that the medium
requires the use of only one language, marketers can adopt using the primary language
of their brands target audience.
Community comprises of 5 major outstanding features that provides values to marketers

and the audience, as listed below.
• Stability: usually derived as a result of core members who interact and share information
over a lengthy period of time.
• Typical: members of a community become part of the community because they share
the same interest or have he same intent on specific goals.
• Dialogue: interactions with and between each other in the community, related to brand
issues, and sometimes may develop into the main topic for discussion for the entire
community.
• Exchange relations: sometimes, communities include different set of activities such as
topics and discussions that involves specific members engagement.
• Dedication: this arises from interactions and engagement over a period of time, hence,
creating motivations to participate more often in the community.
Every social media marketing initiative should include all of these features, as it provides
a progressive marketing strategy for marketers that frequently require time, participation, and
engagement to produce results. To utilize social media in generating marketing success,
marketers should think about its network effects, otherwise known as the crowd effect, to create
viral awareness for their brands. Examples include Lay’s ‘Do Us A Favor’21, Bathroom spray
deodorizer Poo-Pourri who describe a sweet smell of success with their hit viral video "Girls
Don't Poop"22; and Gangnam Style23,
5 lessons from the Ice Bucket Challenge
• Personalize Participation
The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge allowed participant two separate ways to participate.
Either dumping loads of ice water on your head or just directly donating to the cause
works. In reference to marketing techniques, giving or allowing your audience in more
than a single way to make inputs and spread your brands. Nowadays, with the recent
Summary
advancement in technology, some students still prefer a paperback to an ebook
• Power of Peer Pressure

Nobody likes a challenge or wants to be challenged; especially if it involves a task that
could easily be done. The ‘challenge a friend’ concept is another major reason behind
the campaign success, as many participants can easily post their videos to their social
media profiles such as Facebook and twitter, where they can use Facebook tagging
feature and twitter mentions to challenge their friend. This shows how marketers can use
several means to include a sharing feature in their social media marketing campaigns,
either by adding share buttons, through referrals, social content and contest that
includes the participants and the general audience in the social media space.
• Everyone Loves a Star

In social media marketing, support such as a single retweet or like from celebrities play a
pivotal role that works like a charm in brand marketing campaigns, and this also worked
for the Ice Bucket Challenge. Everyone from the famous founder of Microsoft, Bill
Gates24, to one of the greatest football player of all time, Cristiano Ronaldo and other
soccer stars took part in the challenge25. But the true reality is that marketing do not
necessarily need a Barrack Obama to make their brand campaign successful. To tell the
truth, a famous celebrity might not make sense for a partic
ular brand marketing, or even attract the wrong kind of attention that might lead to the
downfall of that brand 26 . Therefore, marketers should examine good leaders and
motivational speakers who can provide a better significance and influence the audience
towards their brand.
• Model it with Fun
Furthermore, marketing campaigns should be designed with fun. Everybody loves fun.
Camping, going on excursion trips, baking cakes, and other activities tends to attract the
audience interest. The ALS Association strategically decided to spread the Ice Bucket
Challenge at the hottest part of the year, in the summer, when people are already
looking for ways to cool off from the hot sun
• Be in the history books

Lastly, the ALS challenge went viral because the some audience wants would like to be
part of the story and be included in the history books, and this campaign provided an
avenue for them to achieve that. Several kids participated individually, shared the videos
with their friends, and nominated their parents, to feel that they are doing something
Summary
good, as many of them do not have money or really care about donating. Millions of
years from now, as anthropologists conduct researches through the remains of our
civilization, they will discover several strange happenings in the YouTube video
archives; millions of people cheerfully dumping ice and water over their heads.
4.4 Conclusion
Conclusively, it is evident that social media marketing is more productive than the
traditional modes of marketing, which includes newspapers, TV ads, etc. Social media provides
an important source of information that associates with consumer behaviours and action. It
provides conversation and relationship with your audience. This stipulates that marketing is no
longer in one dimension, but a two-way process of engagement. It requires a push- giving the
message, and pull strategy – receiving ideas. Secondly, the advent of the new media that
comprised of technological-mediated social communication provided the unparalleled capacity
to connect individuals simultaneously. It offers several ways of engaging the audience through
voice, text, images or video. Hence, it also increasing market accessibility to consumers, and
allowing consumers to literally connect to their influencers, people with similar interest, start
political movements and increase brand awareness by establishing trust and brand loyalty.
Today, organizations in Africa cannot avoid this marketing strategy, as it is seemingly an

impossible task to separate business markets from the online world. While marketers must tread
carefully with social media marketing, starting a marketing initiative that involves community and
engagement requires detailed planning, coupled with a lot of thought, user dedication and,
above all, a significant commitment of the marketer’s time.
This sets a good foundation for Africa’s marketing industry, with the internet estimated to
contribute a minimum of $300 billion to Africa’s GDP by 202527, social media marketing could
contribute almost $230 billion out of the estimated $300 billion to Africa’s remarkable growth by
then. For a continent, such as Africa that has gone through its fair share of restriction and
massive surveillance during long periods of rule characterized by dictatorships and military
regimes, social media is a refreshing and important tool towards its market and economic
stability.
Summary
Footnotes
1
CNN - http://edition.cnn.com/2014/01/24/business/davos-africa-mobile-explosion/
2
http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Documents/statistics/2014/ITU_Key_2005-
2014_ICT_data.xls
3
www.internetworldstats.com/stats1.html
4
5
http://thenextweb.com/africa/2011/11/07/mobile-tipped-to-grow-60-in-africa-passing-1-billion-
subscriptions-by-2016/
6
http://www.successfulblogging.com/in-bed-with-seth-godin/
7
future/
8
https://twitter.com/hashtag/ArikWhereIsMyIpad?src=hash
9
http://t.co/qwbnHpZlZC
10
http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/high_tech_telecoms_internet/lions_go_digital_the_internets
_transformative_potential_in_africa
11
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/cashing-gangnam-styles-youtube-fame
12
http://businessdayonline.com/2014/10/jumia-konga-adibba-olx-ride-on-social-media-for-
growth/#.VHW-bIvjtUQ
13
https://business.linkedin.com/talent-solutions/products/work-with-us
14
http://simplymeasured.com/blog/2014/05/22/lessons-from-coca-colas-social-media-strategy-
cohesive-campaigns-and-creative-content/
15
16
https://twitter.com/stefanieatdell
17
http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/19/power/ps1q14-20140179-jervis
18
http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/236127
19
http://blog.palmeradagency.com/social-media-marketing-how-much-is-too-much
20
http://www.manutd.com
21
http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/us-flavor-lay-launches-1-million-chip-flavor-
192908678.html
22
23
http://www.forbes.com/sites/hughmcintyre/2014/06/16/at-2-billion-views-gangnam-style-has-
made-psy-a-very-rich-man/
24
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/bill-gates/11039690/Microsoft-founder-Bill-Gates-
excels-at-charity-Ice-Bucket-Challenge.html
25
http://www.goal.com/en-sg/news/3884/global/2014/08/24/5056488/avb-ronaldo-messi-
mourinho-footballs-best-als-ice-bucket
26
http://mediakix.com/2013/10/fashion-panel-celebrities-vs-influencers-wins/
27
http://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/dotcom/Insights/High%20Tech%20Internet/Lions
%20go%20digital/MGI_Lions_go_digital_Full_report_Nov2013.ashx
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Social Media Marketing; The Case of Africa.

Research · October 2016

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

Challenges of Social Media Marketing In Africa.

A research project submitted to the

In partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of

Master of Engineering, (M.Eng.), Technology Innovation Management

Keywords: Social Media, Marketing, Community, Communication, Engagement, Participation,

Social Media Acceptance

1.0 Social Media Marketing Defined

1.1 The Shift in Marketing Communication

Abraham (2006) emphasized on the importance of an increase of 10 mobile phone users

But these challenges have simultaneously contributed to a remarkable growth rate in

1.2 Preliminary existence of the Digital divide in Africa

• mental access – lack of elementary digital experience.

• material access – refers to lack of ownership of computer and network

1.3 Social Media Marketing Acceptance

Moreover, the adoption of information and communication technologies and Internet

Social media is undoubtedly having a major impact on nations, in terms of politics,

Furthermore, social media marketing is about understanding how technology is making it

Social Media Integration

2.0 The Business of Social Media

2.1 Organizational Structure and Social Media

In some organizations, the employee who manages Facebook is being referred to as

2.2 Choosing the right Social Media Channel & Tactics

Channels Social Networks

2.3 Market Integration Models of Social Media

Understanding the categories, use, and impacts of social media applications is

Therefore, to reconcile the different stipulated approaches posed by several authors,

1. The Passive way: a source of customer voice and market information.

2.3.1 Leveraging Social Media for Consumer Markets &

2.3.2 Social Marketing Communication (A 4-step Process)

Step 1 – People; describe the audience.

Step 4 – Technology; choose technology.

Ideally, social media integration in marketing communications creates a productive and

2.4 Aligning Network tools in Marketing Practices

2.4.1 The A.I.D.A Framework

2.5 Cautions in Integrating Social Media into Marketing Practices

2.6 Successful Metrics of Social Media Integration

Table 1: Major Social channels and tools.

Participation & Engagement in

• Reputational status – some members of the community are commended as

3.1 Modifying consumer behavior and market decisions

3.2 Social Media as a Participatory Culture

Participatory culture is a term that is mostly used to designate the involvement of

3.2.1 Managing the online conversation

Previous research indicates how consumers’ positive experience with a brand

Publishing Content in Online Communities

3.2.2 Market Communication Strategy

Communication strategy emphasize on the main reasons of using social media to

Driving customer engagement

3.2.3 Cultivating Advocates & Social Content Strategy

Transparent in community participation

Influencers and Communities

Connecting and Engaging with the audience

3.3 Brand Communication Continuity and Value Capture

Continuity ensures that a brand message is properly portrayed in different ways

Consumers’ contribution & Control

3.4 Social media and Viral Awareness

spokeswoman, Andrea Rader said ‘We’re so delighted. We think this is just a

• Power of Peer Pressure

• Everyone Loves a Star