رسانه های اجتماعی در بازاریابی: بررسی و تجزیه و تحلیل ادبیات موجود Social media in marketing: A review and analysis of the existing literature

1. Introduction People increasingly look at social media applications as an important part of their daily life and more likely to move their interactions to the virtual platforms (i.e. Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter). This, in turn, positively reflect on their orientations and behaviours toward all kinds of social media technology as reported by Alalwan et al. (2016a), Dwivedi et al. (2015), Rathore et al. (2016), Taylor et al. (2011), Zhu and Chen (2015). Therefore, social media applications have been observed as one of the most efficient and influential implications that have been progressively engaged in most aspects of people’s lives (i.e. social life, commercial life, business life, educational sector, political life) (Alalwan et al., 2016a; Algharabat et al., 2017; Abed et al., 2015; Hawkins and Vel, 2013; Hinz et al., 2011; Rathore et al., 2016; Usher et al., 2014; Zeng and Gerritsen, 2014; Zhu and Chen, 2015). Social media has been largely realised as an effective mechanism that contributes to the firms’ marketing aims and strategy; especially in the aspects related to customers’ involvement, customer relationship management and communication (Filo et al., 2015; Saxena and Khanna, 2013). For instance, from the perspective of the national governing bodies, social media could strategically enhance a two-way communication between firms and customers, and accordingly, attaching customers more with the organisations’ brands. This would be in addition to the ability of social media to present the content posted visually, verbally, or textually or using a mix of textual, visual, and verbal content (Okazaki and Taylor, 2013). Over different contexts, firms have been looking forward to utilising the social media in many aspects of their interaction with customers such as facilitating the information search, interactivity, promotion and enhancing the customers buying behaviours (Zeng and Gerritsen, 2014). Therefore, a variety of interactive practices and mechanisms have been developed by organisations to enhance their brand identity as well as their marketing performance (Leeflang et al., 2014; Filo et al., 2015; Schultz and Peltier, 2013). In fact, a considerable amount of time and resources have been projected over this area in order to attract more customers either in the terms of involvement or in the term of online customer relationship (Filo et al., 2015). Bennett (2013) reported that most business firms (about 93%) worldwide have adopted and engaged such innovative platforms and tools in their process to communicate and serve their customers.