Social Media Marketing: Guidelines During a Global Crisis
Martikainen, Benitta (2020)
Martikainen, Benitta
2020
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-2020111022485
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-2020111022485
Tiivistelmä
Our world experienced unprecedented times in 2020 when the global COVID-19 pandemic started spreading from China. It took only a few months for it to reach Europe and other parts of the world, the pandemic forced societies to find ways to slow down and to stop the virus from spreading many countries ended up in partial or full lockdowns. This resulted in people having to spend more and more time inside their homes.
Social media enables fast-paced many-to-many communication. It is an efficient way to reach consumers inside their homes, making it a perfect channel to be used for marketing in digital ages, but especially during a global crisis like COVID-19, which resulted in people having to spend more time indoors. The extraordinary methods countries had to take into force during the pandemic, clearly affected businesses. The objective of this thesis was to create guidelines through existing examples to be used in business-to-consumer social media marketing during a global crisis. This thesis aimed to investigate what type of social media marketing had been done during the start of the viral global COVID-19 pandemic. The example data was collected starting from March to October 2020 from the different social media platforms. The author chose social media marketing examples from different social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. The examples were analyzed through qualitative content analysis. The analysis allowed finding the recurring themes from the examples; those discovered recurring themes were utilized to make the guidelines to social media marketing during a crisis.
The thesis consists of a theoretical introduction to social media and social media marketing as well as relevant marketing and sociology theories. Followed by introducing the research methods used and the presentation of the social media marketing examples, and the analysis of said examples. The thesis ends in a discussion, introducing further research suggestions, and summarizing the whole research process.
Social media enables fast-paced many-to-many communication. It is an efficient way to reach consumers inside their homes, making it a perfect channel to be used for marketing in digital ages, but especially during a global crisis like COVID-19, which resulted in people having to spend more time indoors. The extraordinary methods countries had to take into force during the pandemic, clearly affected businesses. The objective of this thesis was to create guidelines through existing examples to be used in business-to-consumer social media marketing during a global crisis. This thesis aimed to investigate what type of social media marketing had been done during the start of the viral global COVID-19 pandemic. The example data was collected starting from March to October 2020 from the different social media platforms. The author chose social media marketing examples from different social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. The examples were analyzed through qualitative content analysis. The analysis allowed finding the recurring themes from the examples; those discovered recurring themes were utilized to make the guidelines to social media marketing during a crisis.
The thesis consists of a theoretical introduction to social media and social media marketing as well as relevant marketing and sociology theories. Followed by introducing the research methods used and the presentation of the social media marketing examples, and the analysis of said examples. The thesis ends in a discussion, introducing further research suggestions, and summarizing the whole research process.