عناصر بازاریابی رسانه های اجتماعی استراتژیک Elements of strategic social media marketing: A holistic framework

1. Introduction Understanding the role of social media in the context of marketing is critical for both researchers and managers (e.g. Fong & Burton, 2008; Kumar, Bezawada, Rishika, Janakiraman, & Kannan, 2016; Schultz & Peltier, 2013). Most existing studies focus on particular issues, such as purchase behavior (Chang, Yu, & Lu, 2015; Kumar et al., 2016; Relling, Schnittka, Sattler, & Johnen, 2016), customer relationship management (Trainor, Andzulis, Rapp, & Agnihotri, 2014), brand management (Asmussen, Harridge-March, Occhiocupo, & Farquhar, 2013), innovation management (Gebauer, Füller, & Pezzei, 2013), and employee recruitment (Sivertzen, Nilsen, & Olafsen, 2013). While these studies detail advancements in specialized areas of social media knowledge in a marketing and management context, extant literature does not provide a holistic framework for social media marketing at the strategic level. This deficiency is surprising because both academics (Labrecque, vor dem Esche, Mathwick, Novak, & Hofacker, 2013; Schultz & Peltier, 2013; Yadav & Pavlou, 2014) and practitioners (Divol, Edelman, & Sarrazin, 2012) acknowledge new complexities accompanying these media and agree that research into social media marketing needs to be reconceptualized. In a nutshell, strategic social media marketing remains an untested user interaction paradigm (Naylor, Lamberton, & West, 2012) with little published academic research. The current article aims to address this theoretically and managerially important research gap by exploring the following two research questions: How is strategic social media marketing defined and conceptualized? and What factors demand consideration when constructing an organization’s social media marketing strategy? Specifically, this research attempts to define the continua on which critical strategic social media marketing decisions lie and to integrate them into a holistic framework. The theoretical contribution of this research is threefold. First, this research provides a comprehensive definition and conceptualization of strategic social media marketing. This conceptualization goes beyond an isolated focus on consumers and/or communicative aspects discussed in existing social media marketing literature.