NOTE COMPREHENSIVELY ALL INSIGHTS AND KNOWLEDGE ABOUT SMMS IN THIS JOURNAL ARTICLE: "Social media marketing strategy: definition, conceptualization,
taxonomy, validation, and future agenda
Fangfang Li1 & Jorma Larimo1 & Leonidas C. Leonidou2
Received: 11 December 2018 /Accepted: 20 May 2020
# The Author(s) 2020
Abstract
Although social media use is gaining increasing importance as a component of firms’ portfolio of strategies, scant research has
systematically consolidated and extended knowledge on social media marketing strategies (SMMSs). To fill this research gap, we
first define SMMS, using social media and marketing strategy dimensions. This is followed by a conceptualization of the
developmental process of SMMSs, which comprises four major components, namely drivers, inputs, throughputs, and outputs.
Next, we propose a taxonomy that classifies SMMSs into four types according to their strategic maturity level: social commerce
strategy, social content strategy, social monitoring strategy, and social CRM strategy. We subsequently validate this taxonomy of
SMMSs using information derived from prior empirical studies, as well with data collected from in-depth interviews and a
quantitive survey among social media marketing managers. Finally, we suggest fruitful directions for future research based on
input received from scholars specializing in the field.
Keywords Social media . Social media marketing strategy . Customer engagement . Marketing strategy
Introduction
The past decade has witnessed the development of complex,
multifarious, and intensified interactions between firms and
their customers through social media usage. On the one hand,
firms are taking advantage of social media platforms to expand geographic reach to buyers (Gao et al. 2018), bolster
brand evaluations (Naylor et al. 2012), and build closer connections with customers (Rapp et al. 2013). On the other hand,
customers are increasingly empowered by social media and
taking control of the marketing communication process, and
they are becoming creators, collaborators, and commentators
of messages (Hamilton et al. 2016). As the role of social media
has gradually evolved from a single marketing tool to that of a
marketing intelligence source (in which firms can observe,
analyze, and predict customer behaviors), it has become increasingly imperative for marketers to strategically use and
leverage social media to achieve competitive advantage and
superior performance (Lamberton and Stephen 2016).
Despite widespread understanding among marketers of the
need to engage customers on social media platforms, relatively few firms have properly strategized their social media appearance and involvement (Choi and Thoeni 2016; Griffiths
and Mclean 2015). Rather, for most companies, the ongoing
challenge is not to initiate social media campaigns, but to
combine social media with their marketing strategy to engage
customers in order to build valuable and long-term relationships with them (Lamberton and Stephen 2016; Schultz and Peltier 2013). However, despite the vast opportunities social
media offer to companies, there is no clear definition or comprehensive framework to guide the integration of social media
with marketing strategies, to gain a rigorous understanding of
the nature and role of social media marketing strategies
(SMMSs) (Effing and Spil 2016).
Although some reviews focusing on the social media phenomenon are available (e.g., Lamberton and Stephen 2016;
Salo 2017), to date, an integrative evaluation effort focusing
on the strategic marketing perspective of social media is missing. This is partly because the social media literature largely
derives elements from widely disparate fields, such as marketing, management, consumer psychology, and computer science (Aral et al. 2013). Moreover, research on SMMSs mainly
covers very specific, isolated, and scattered aspects, which
creates confusion and limits understanding of the subject
(Lamberton and Stephen 2016). Furthermore, research deals
only tangentially with a conceptualization, operationalization,
and categorization of SMMSs, which limits theory advancement and practice development (Tafesse and Wien 2018).
To address these problems, and also to respond to repeated
pleas from scholars in the field (e.g., Aral et al. 2013; Guesalaga
2016; Moorman and Day 2016; Schultz and Peltier 2013 to
identify appropriate strategies to leverage social media in today’s changing marketing landscape, we aim to systematically
consolidate and extend the knowledge accumulated from previous research on SMMSs. Specifically, our objectives are fivefold: (1) to clearly define SMMS by blending issues derived
from the social media and marketing strategy literature streams;
(2) to conceptualize the process of developing SMMSs and
provide a theoretical understanding of its constituent parts; (3)
to provide a taxonomy of SMMSs according to their level of
strategic maturity; (4) to validate the practical value of this
taxonomy using information derived from previous empirical
studies, as well as from primary data collection among social
media marketing managers; and (5) to develop an agenda for
promising areas of future research on the subject.
Our study makes three major contributions to the social
media marketing literature. First, it offers a definition and a
conceptualization of SMMS that help alleviate definitional
deficiency and increase conceptual clarity on the subject. By
focusing on the role of social connectedness and interactions
in resource integration, we stress the importance of
transforming social media interactions and networks into marketing resources to help achieve specific strategic goals for the
firm. In this regard, we provide theoretical justification of
social media from a strategic marketing perspective. Second,
using customer engagement as an overarching theory, we develop a model conceptualizing the SMMS developmental process. Through an analysis of each component of this process,
we emphasize the role of insights from both firms and customers to better understand the dynamics of SMMS formulation. We also suggest certain theories to specifically explain
the particular role played by each of these components in
developing sound SMMSs. Third, we propose a taxonomy
of SMMSs based on their level of strategic maturity that can
serve as the basis for developing specific marketing strategy
concepts and measurement scales within a social media context. We also expect this taxonomy to provide social media
marketing practitioners with fruitful insights on why to select
and how to use a particular SMMS in order to achieve superior
marketing results.
Defining SMMS
Although researchers have often used the term “social media
marketing strategy” in their studies (e.g., Choi and Thoeni
2016; Kumar et al. 2013; Zhang et al. 2017), they have yet
to propose a clear definition. Despite the introduction of several close terms in the past, including “social media strategy”
(Aral et al. 2013; Effing and Spil 2016), “online marketing
strategy” (Micu et al. 2017), and “strategic social media marketing” (Felix et al. 2017), these either fail to take into consideration the different functions/features of social media or
neglect key marketing strategy issues. What is therefore required is an all-encompassing definition of SMMS that will
capture two fundamental elements—namely, social media and
marketing strategy. Table 1 draws a comparison between social media and marketing strategy on five dimensions (i.e.,
core, orientation, resource, purpose, and premise) and presents
the resulting profile of SMMS.
Social media
In a marketing context, social media are considered platforms
on which people build networks and share information and/or
sentiments (Kaplan and Haenlein 2010). With their distinctive
nature of being “dynamic, interconnected, egalitarian, and interactive organisms” (Peters et al. 2013, p. 281), social media
have generated three fundamental shifts in the marketplace.
First, social media enable firms and customers to connect in
ways that were not possible in the past. Such connectedness is
empowered by various platforms, such as social networking
sites (e.g., Facebook), microblogging sites (e.g., Twitter), and
content communities (e.g., YouTube), that allow social networks to build from shared interests and values (Kaplan and
Haenlein 2010). In this regard, “social connectedness” has
also been termed as “social ties” (e.g., Muller and Peres
2019; Quinton and Wilson 2016), and the strength and span
of these ties determine whether they are strong or weak
(Granovetter 1973). Prior studies have shown that tie strength
is an important determinant of customer referral behaviors
(e.g., Verlegh et al. 2013).
Second, social media have transformed the way firms and
customers interact and influence each other. Social interaction
52 J. of the Acad. Mark. Sci. (2021) 49:51–70
involves “actions,” whether through communications or passive observations, that influence others’ choices and consumption behaviors (Chen et al. 2011). Nair et al. (2010) labeled
such social interactions as “word-of-mouth (WOM) effect” or
“contagion effects.” Muller and Peres (2019) argue that social
interactions rely strongly on the social network structure and
provide firms with measurable value (also referred to as “social equity”). In social media studies, researchers have long
recognized the importance of social influence in affecting consumer decisions, and recent studies have shown that people’s
connection patterns and the strength of social ties can signify
the intensity of social interactions (e.g., Aral and Walker
2014; Katona et al. 2011).
Third, the proliferation of social media data has made it
increasingly possible for companies to better manage customer relationships and enhance decision making in business
(Libai et al. 2010). Social media data, together with other
digital data, are widely characterized by the 3Vs (i.e., volume,
variety, and velocity), which refer to the vast quantity of data,
various sources of data, and expansive real-time data (Alharthi
et al. 2017). A huge amount of social media data derived from
different venues (e.g., social networks, blogs, forums) and in
various formats (e.g., text, video, image) can now be easily
extracted and usefully exploited with the aid of modern information technologies (Moe and Schweidel 2017). Thus, social
media data can serve as an important source of customer analysis, market research, and crowdsourcing of new ideas, while
capturing and creating value through social media data represents the development of a new strategic resource that can
improve marketing outcomes (Gnizy 2019).
Marketing strategy
According to Varadarajan (2010), a marketing strategy consists of an integrated set of decisions that helps the firm make
critical choices regarding marketing activities in selected markets and segments, with the aim to create, communicate, and
deliver value to customers in exchange for accomplishing its
specific financial, market, and other objectives. According to
the resource-based view of the firm (Barney 1991), organizational resources (e.g., financial, human, physical, informational, relational) help firms enhance their marketing strategies,
achieve sustainable competitive advantage, and gain better
performance. These resources can be either tangible or intangible and can be transformed into higher-order resources (i.e.,
competencies and capabilities), enabling the delivery of superior value to targeted buyers (Hunt and Morgan 1995; Teece
and Pisano 1994).
Different marketing strategies can be arranged on a
continuum, on which transaction marketing strategy and
relationship marketing strategy represent its two ends,
while in between are various mixed marketing strategies
(Grönroos 1991). Webster (1992) notes that long-standing
customer relationships should be at the core of marketing
strategy, because customer interaction and engagement
can be developed into valuable relational resources
(Hunt et al. 2006). Morgan and Hunt (1999) also claim
that firms capitalizing on long-term and trustworthy customer relationships can help design value-enhancing marketing strategies that will subsequently generate competitive advantages and lead to superior performance. SMMS
From a strategic marketing perspective, social media interaction entails a process that allows not only firms, but
also customers to exchange resources. For example,
Hollebeek et al. (2019) assert that customers can devote
operant (e.g., knowledge) and operand (e.g., equipment)
resources while interacting with firms. Importantly,
Gummesson and Mele (2010) argue that interactions occur not simply in dyads, but also between multiple actors
within a network, underscoring the critical role of network
interaction in resource integration. Notably, customer-tocustomer interactions are also essential, especially for the
higher level of engagement behaviors (Fehrer et al. 2018).
Thus, social media interconnectedness and interactions
(i.e., between firm–customer and between customer–
Table 1 Comparison of social media, marketing strategy, and social media marketing strategy
Dimension Social media Marketing strategy Social media marketing strategy
Core Interaction and connectedness Long-term customer relationship building Customer engagement
Orientation Passive actor versus active actor Transactional-oriented versus
relational-oriented
Transactional-oriented versus
engagement-oriented
Resource Resource integrator Basic resources and high-order resources In exchange with customer-owned resources
Purpose To interact and connect To achieve competitive advantage To generate, integrate, and reconfigure
social media resources to achieve
specific marketing objectives
Premise To recognize different customer
motivations of social media
brand-related activities
To enhance long-lasting customer
relationships by delivering
superior value
To capitalize on social media interactions
and customer engagement so as to
generate marketing resources
J. of the Acad. Mark. Sci. (2021) 49:51–70 53
customer) can be considered strategic resources, which
can be further converted into marketing capabilities
(Morgan and Hunt 1999). A case in point is social customer relationship management (CRM) capabilities, in
which the firm cultivates the competency to use information generated from social media interactions to identify
and develop loyal customers (Trainor et al. 2014). With
the expanding role of social media from a single communication tool to one of gaining customer and market
knowledge, marketers can strategically develop distinct
resources from social media based on extant organizational resources and capabilities.
Drawing on the previous argumentation, we define
SMMS as an organization’s integrated pattern of activities that, based on a careful assessment of customers’
motivations for brand-related social media use and the
undertaking of deliberate engagement initiatives, transform social media connectedness (networks) and interactions (influences) into valuable strategic means to achieve
desirable marketing outcomes. This definition is parsimonious because it captures the uniqueness of the social
media phenomenon, takes into consideration the fundamental premises of marketing strategy, and clearly defines
the scope of activities pertaining to SMMS.
Although the underlying roots of traditional marketing
strategy and SMMS are similar, the two strategies have three
distinctive differences: (1) as opposed to the traditional approach, which pays peripheral attention to the heterogeneity
of motivations driving customer engagement, SMMS emphasizes that social media users must be motivated on intellectual,
social, cultural, or other grounds to engage with firms (and
perhaps more importantly with other customers) (Peters et al.
2013; Venkatesan 2017); (2) the consequences of SMMS are
jointly decided by the firm and its customers (rather than by
individual actors’ behaviors), and it is only when the firm and
its customers interact and build relationships that social media
technological platforms become real resource integrators
(Singaraju et al. 2016; Stewart and Pavlou 2002); and (3)
while customer value in traditional marketing strategies is
narrowly defined to solely capture purchase behavior through
customer lifetime value, in the case of SMMS, this value is
expressed through customer engagement, comprising both direct (e.g., customer purchases) and indirect (e.g., product referrals to other customers) contributions to the value of the
firm (Kumar and Pansari 2016; Venkatesan 2017).
Conceptualizing the process of developing
SMMSs
The conceptualization of the process of developing SMMSs is
anchored on customer engagement theory, which posits that
firms need to take deliberate initiatives to motivate and
empower customers to maximize their engagement value
and yield superior marketing results (Harmeling et al. 2017).
Kumar et al. (2010) distinguish between four different dimensions of customer engagement value, namely customer lifetime value, customer referral value, customer influence value,
and customer knowledge value. This metric has provided a
new approach for customer valuation, which can help marketers to make more effective and efficient strategic decisions
that enable long-term value contributions to customers. In a
social media context, this customer engagement value enables
firms to capitalize on crucial customer resources (i.e., network
assets, persuasion capital, knowledge stores, and creativity),
of which the leverage can provide firms with a sustainable
competitive advantage (Harmeling et al. 2017).
Customer engagement theory highlights the importance of
understanding customer motivations as a prerequisite for the
firm to develop effective SMMSs, because heterogeneous
customer motivations resulting from different attitudes and
attachments can influence their social media behaviors and
inevitably SMMS outcomes (Venkatesan 2017). It also stresses the role of inputs from both firm (i.e., social media engagement initiatives) and customers (i.e., social media behaviors),
as well as the importance of different degrees of interactivity
and interconnectedness in yielding sound marketing outcomes
(Harmeling et al. 2017). Pansari and Kumar et al. (2017) argue
that firms can benefit from such customer engagement in both
tangible (e.g., higher revenues, market share, profits) and intangible (e.g., feedbacks or new ideas that help to product/
service development) ways.
Based on consumer engagement theory, we therefore conceive the process of developing an SMMS as consisting of
four interlocking parts: (1) drivers, that is, the firm’s social
media marketing objectives and the customers’ social media
use motivations; (2) inputs, that is, the firm’s social media
engagement initiatives and the customers’ social media behaviors; (3) throughputs, that is, the way the firm connects
and interacts with customers to exchange resources and satisfy
needs; and (4) outputs, that is, the resulting customer engagement outcome. Figure 1 shows this developmental process of
SMMS, while Table 2 indicates the specific theoretical underpinnings of each part comprising this process. Drivers
Firms’ social media marketing objectives Though operating in
a similar context, SMMSs may differ depending on the firm’s
strategic objectives (Varadarajan 2010). According to resource dependence theory (Pfeffer and Salancik 1978), the
firm’s social media marketing objectives can be justified by
the need to acquire external resources (which do not exist
internally) that will help it accommodate the challenges of
environmental contingencies. In a social media context, customers can serve as providers of resources, which can take
54 J. of the Acad. Mark. Sci. (2021) 49:51–70
several forms (Harmeling et al. 2017). Felix et al. (2017) distinguish between proactive and reactive social media marketing objectives, which can differ by the type of market targeted
(e.g., B2B vs. B2C) and firm size. While for proactive objectives, firms use social media to increase brand awareness,
generate online traffic, and stimulate sales, in the case of reactive objectives, the emphasis is on monitoring and analyzing
customer activities.
Customers’ social media use motivations Social media use
motivations refer to various incentives that drive people’s selection and use of specific social media (Muntinga et al. 2011).
The existence of these motivations is theoretically grounded
on uses and gratifications theory (Katz et al. 1973), which
maintains that consumers are actively and selectively involved
in media usage to gratify their psychological and social needs.
In a social media context, motivations can range from utilitarian and hedonic purposes (e.g., incentives, entertainment) to
relational reasons (e.g., identification, brand connection)
(Rohm et al. 2013). Muntinga et al. (2011) also categorize
consumer–brand social media interactions as motivated primarily by entertainment, information, remuneration, personal
identity, social interaction, and empowerment.
Inputs
Firms’ social media engagement initiatives Firms take initiatives to motivate and engage customers so that they can make
voluntary contributions in return (Harmeling et al. 2017;
Pansari and Kumar 2017). These firm actions can also be
theoretically explained by resource dependence theory
(Pfeffer and Salancik 1978), which argues that firms need to
take initiatives to encourage customers to interact with them,
to generate useful autonomous contributions that will alleviate
resource shortages. Harmeling et al. (2017) identify two primary forms of a firm’s marketing initiatives to engage customers using social media: task-based and experiential. While
task-based engagement initiatives encourage customer engagement behaviors with structured tasks (e.g., writing a review) and usually take place in the early stages of the firm’s
Fig. 1 A conceptualization of the
process of developing social
media marketing strategies
Table 2 Theoretical anchoring of components constituting the process of developing social media marketing strategies
J. of the Acad. Mark. Sci. (2021) 49:51–70 55
social media marketing efforts, experiential engagement initiatives employ experiential events (e.g., multisensory events)
to intrinsically motivate customer engagement and foster emotional attachment. Thus, firm engagement initiatives can be
viewed as a continuum, where at one end, the firm uses monetary rewards to engage customers and, at the other end, the
firm proactively works to deliver effective experiential incentives to motivate customer engagement.
Customers’ social media behaviors The use of social media by
customers yields different behavioral manifestations, ranging
from passive (e.g., observing) to active (e.g., co-creation)
(Maslowska et al. 2016). These customer social media behaviors can be either positive (e.g., sharing) or negative (e.g.,
create negative content), depending on customers’ attitudes
and information processes during interactions (Dolan et al.
2016). Harmeling et al. (2017) characterize customers with
positive behaviors as “pseudo marketers” because they contribute to firms’ marketing functions using their own resources, while those with negative behaviors may turn firmcreated “hashtags” into “bashtags.” Drawing on uses and
gratifications theory, Muntinga et al. (2011) also categorize
customers’ brand-related behaviors in social media into three
groups: consuming (e.g., reading a brand’s posts), contributing (e.g., rating products), and creating (e.g., publishing
brand-related content).
Throughputs
Within the context of social media, both social connectedness
and social interaction can be explained by social exchange
theory, which proposes that social interactions are exchanges
through which two parties acquire benefits (Blau 1964).
Based on this theory, such a social exchange involves a sequence of interactions between firms and customers that are
usually interdependent and contingent on others’ actions, with
the goal to generate sound relationships (Cropanzano and
Mitchell 2005). Thus, successful exchanges can advance interpersonal connections (referred to as social exchange relationships) with beneficial effects for the interacting parties
(Cropanzano and Mitchell 2005).
Social connectedness Social connectedness indicates the number of ties an individual has on social networks (Goldenberg
et al. 2009), while Kumar et al. (2010) define connectedness
with additional dimensions, including the number of connections, the strength of the connections, and the location in the
network. Social media research suggests that connectedness
has a significant impact on social influence. For example,
Hinz et al. (2011) show that the use of “hubs” (highly connected people) in viral marketing campaigns can be eight
times more successful than strategies using less connected
people. Verlegh et al. (2013) also examine the impact of tie
strength on making referrals in social media and confirm that
people tend to interpret ambiguous information received from
strong ties positively, but negatively when this information
comes from weak ties. text is quite complex, as it represents multidirectional and
interconnected information flows, rather than a pure firm
monologue (Hennig-Thurau et al. 2013). This is because, on
the one hand, social media have empowered customers to be
equal actors in firm–customer interactions through sharing,
gaming, expressing, and networking, while, on the other hand,
customer–customer interactions have emerged as a growing
market force, as customers can influence each other with regard to their attitudinal or behavioral changes (Peters et al.
2013). Chen et al. (2011) identify two types of social interactions—namely, opinion- or preference-based interactions
(e.g., WOM) and action- or behavior-based interactions
(e.g., observational learning)—with each requiring different
strategic actions to be taken. Chahine and Malhotra (2018)
also show that two-way (multiway) interaction strategies that
allow reciprocity result in higher market reactions and more
positive relationships.
Outputs
Customer engagement The outputs are expressed in terms of
customer engagement, which reflects the outcome of firm–
customer (as well as customer–customer) connectedness and
interaction in social media (Harmeling et al. 2017).1 It is essentially a reflection of “the intensity of an individual’s participation in and connection with an organization’s offerings
and/or organizational activities, which either the customer or
the firm initiates” (Vivek et al. 2012, p. 127). The more customers connect and interact with the firm’s activities, the
higher is the level of customer engagement created (Kumar
and Pansari 2016; Malthouse et al. 2013) and the higher the
customer’s value addition to the firm (Pansari and Kumar
2017). Although the theoretical explanation of the notion of
customer engagement has attracted a great deal of debate
among scholars in the field, research (e.g., Brodie et al.
2011; Hollebeek et al. 2019; Kumar et al. 2019) has also
begun adopting the service-dominant (S-D) logic (Vargo and
Lusch 2004) because of its emphasis on customers’ interactive
and value co-creation experiences in market relationships.
Following the service-dominant (S-D) logic, Hollebeek et al.
1 Although in our conceptualization of the process of developing SMMSs we
treat customer engagement as the output of this process, we fully acknowledge
that firms’ ultimate objective to engage in social media marketing activities is
to improve their market (e.g., customer equity) and financial (e.g., revenues)
performance. In fact, extant social media marketing research (e.g., Kumar et al.
2010; Kumar and Pansari 2016; Harmeling et al. 2017) repeatedly stresses the
conducive role of customer engagement in ensuring high performance results.
56 J. of the Acad. Mark. Sci. (2021) 49:51–70
(2019) stress the role of customer resource integration, customer knowledge sharing, and learning as foundational in the
customer engagement process, which can subsequently lead
to customer individual/interpersonal operant resource development and co-creation.
Despite its pivotal role in social media marketing, extant
literature has not yet attained agreement on the specific measurement of customer engagement. For example, Muntinga
et al. (2011) conceptualize customer engagement in social
media as comprising three stages: consuming (e.g., following,
viewing content), contributing (e.g., rating, commenting), and
creating (e.g., user-generated content). Maslowska et al.
(2016) propose three levels of customer engagement behaviors: observing (e.g., reading content), participating (e.g.,
commenting on a post), and co-creating (e.g., partaking in
product development). Moreover, Kumar et al. (2010) distinguish between transactional (i.e., buying the product) and nontransactional (i.e., sharing, commenting, referring, influencing) behaviors of customer engagement derived from social
media connectedness and interactions.
Taxonomy of SMMSs
The distinctive differences among firms engaged in social
media marketing with regard to their strategic objectives, organizational resources and capabilities, and focal industries
and market structures, imply that there must also be differences in the SMMSs pursued. In this section, we first explain
the criteria classifying SMMSs into different groups and then
provide an analysis of their content.
Classification criteria of SMMSs
Drawing from the extant literature, we propose three important criteria that can be used to distinguish SMMSs: the nature
of the firm’s strategic social media objectives with regard to
using social media, the direction of interactions taking place
between the firm and the customers, and the level of customer
engagement achieved.
Strategic social media objectives refer to the specific organizational goals to be achieved by implementing SMMSs
(Choi and Thoeni 2016; Felix et al. 2017). These can range
from transactional to relational-oriented, depending on the
strategist’s mental models of business–customer interactions
(Rydén et al. 2015). Different mental models have a distinctive impact on managers’social media sense-making, which is
responsible for framing the specific role defined by social
media in their marketing activities (Rydén et al. 2015).
Rydén et al. (2015) identify four types of social media marketing objectives with four different mental models that can
guide SMMSs —namely, to promote and sell (i.e., businessto-customers), to connect and collaborate (i.e., business-withcustomers), to listen and learn (i.e., business-from-customers),
and to empower and engage (i.e., business-for-customers).
The direction of the social media interactions can take three
different forms. These include (1) one-way interaction, that is,
traditional one-way communication in which the firm disseminates content (e.g., advertising) on social media and customers
passively observe and react (Hoffman and Thomas 1996); (2)
two-way interaction, that is, reciprocal and interactive communication with exchanges on social media, which can be further
distinguished into firm-initiated interaction (in which the firm
takes the initiative to begin the conversation) and customer participation (by liking, sharing, or commenting on the content) and
customer-initiated interaction (in which the customer is the initiator of conversations by inquiring, giving feedback, or even
posting negative comments about the firm, while the firm listens
and responds to customer voice) (Van Noort and Willemsen
2012); and (3) collaborative interaction, that is, the highest level
of interaction that builds on frequent and reciprocal activities in
which both the firm and the customer have the power to influence each other (Joshi 2009).
With regard to the level of customer engagement, as noted
previously, this heavily depends on the strength of connections
and the intensity of interactions between the firm and the customers in social media, comprising both transactional and nontransactional elements (Kumar et al. 2010). Because customer
engagement is the result of a dynamic and iterative process,
which makes specifying the exact stage from participating to
producing rather difficult (Brodie et al. 2011), we adopt the
approach proposed by various scholars in the field (e.g., Dolan
et al. 2016; Malthouse et al. 2013) to view this as a continuum,
ranging from very low levels of engagement (e.g., “liking” a
page) to very high levels of engagement (e.g., co-creation). Types of SMMSs
With these three classificatory criteria, we can identify four
distinct SMMSs, representing increasing levels of strategic
maturity: social commerce strategy, social content strategy,
social monitoring strategy, and social CRM strategy.2 Fig. 2
illustrates this taxonomy for SMMSs, Table 3 shows the differences between these four strategies, while Appendix
Table 6 provides real company examples using these strategies. In the following, we analyze each of these SMMSs by
explaining their nature and characteristics, the particular role
2 SMMSs are difficult to operationalize by focusing solely on the elements of
the marketing mix (i.e., product, price, distribution, and promotion), mainly
because many other important parameters are involved in their conceptualization, such as relationship management, market development, and business
innovation issues. However, each SMMS seems to have a different marketing
mix focus, with social commerce strategy emphasizing advertising and sales,
social content strategy emphasizing branding and communication, social monitoring strategy emphasizing service and product development, and social
CRM strategy emphasizing customer management and innovation.
J. of the Acad. Mark. Sci. (2021) 49:51–70 57
played by social media, and the specific organizational capabilities required for their adoption.
Social commerce strategy Social commerce strategy refers to
the “exchange-related activities that occur in, or are influenced
by, an individual’s social network in computer-mediated social environments, whereby the activities correspond to the
need recognition, pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase
stages of a focal exchange” (Yadav et al. 2013, p. 312). Rydén
et al. (2015, p. 6) claim that this way of using social media is
not to create conversation and/or engagement; rather, the reasons for “the initial contact and the end purpose are to sell.”
Similarly, Malthouse et al. (2013) argue that social media
promotional activities do not actively engage customers because they do not make full use of the interactive role of social
media. Thus, social commerce strategy can be considered as
the least mature SMMS because it has a mainly transactional
nature and is preoccupied with short-term goal-oriented activities (Grönroos 1994). It is essentially a one-way communication strategy intended to attract customers in the short run.
In this strategy, social media are claimed to be the new selling
tool that has changed the way buyers and sellers interact
(Marshall et al. 2012). They offer a new opportunity for sellers
to obtain customer information and make the initial interaction
with the customer more efficient (Rodriguez et al. 2012).
Meanwhile, firms are also increasingly using social media as
promising outlets for promotional/advertising purposes given
their global reach (e.g., Dao et al. 2014; Zhang and Mao
2016), especially to the millennial generation (Confos and
Davis 2016). However, as firms’ social media activities in this
strategy are more transactional-oriented, customers tend to be
passive and reactive. Customers contribute transactional value
through purchases, but without a higher level of engagement.
Therefore, we conclude that, within the context of this strategy,
customers exchange their monetary resources (e.g., purchases)
with the firm’s promotional offerings.
To better develop this strategy, Guesalaga (2016) highlights
the need to understand the drivers of using social media in the
selling process. He further stresses that personal commitment
plays a crucial role in using social media as selling tools.
Similarly, Järvinen and Taiminen (2016) urged for an integration
of marketing with the sales department in order to gain better
insights from social media marketing efforts. The importance of
synergistic effects between social media and traditional media
(e.g., press mentions, television, in-store promotions) has also
been stressed in supporting social commerce activities (e.g.,
Jayson et al. 2018; Kumar et al. 2016; Stephen and Galak
2012). Thus, selling capabilities are crucial in this strategy, requiring the possession of adequate selling skills and the use of
multiple selling channels to synergize social media effects.
Social content strategy Social content strategy refers to “the
creation and distribution of educational and/or compelling content in multiple formats to attract and/or retain customers”
(Pulizzi and Barrett 2009, p. 8). Thus, this type of SMMS aims
to create and deliver timely and valuable content based on customer needs, rather than promoting products (Järvinen and
Taiminen 2016). By attracting audiences with valuable content,
the increase in customer engagement may ultimately boost
product/service sales (Malthouse et al. 2013). Holliman and
Rowley (2014, p. 269) also claim that content marketing is a
customer-centric strategy and describe the value of content as
“being useful, relevant, compelling, and timely.” Therefore, this
strategy provides a two-way communication in which firms take  the initiative to deliver useful content and customers react positively to this content. The basic premises of this strategy are to
create brand awareness and popularity through content virality,
stimulate customer interactions, and spread positive WOM (De
Vries et al. 2012; Swani et al. 2017).
Social media in this strategy have been widely used as communication tools for branding and WOM purposes (Holliman
and Rowley 2014; Libai et al. 2013). On the one hand, firms
generate content by their own efforts on social media (termed as
‘firm-generated’ or ‘marker-generated’ content) to actively engage consumers. On the other hand, firms encourage customers
to generate the content (termed as ‘user-generated’ content)
through the power of customer-to-customer interactions, as in
the case of exchanging comments and sharing the brand-related
content. In this way, firms provide valuable content in exchange
for customer-owned resources, such as network assets and persuasion capital, to generate positive WOM and achieve a sustainable trusted brand status.
To pursue a social content strategy, firms build on capabilities focusing on how content is designed and presented
(expressed in the form of a social message strategy) and how
content is disseminated (expressed in the form of a seeding
strategy). Thus, understanding customer engagement motivations and social media interactive characteristics is central to
designing valuable content and facilitating customer interactions that would help to stimulate content sharing among customers (Malthouse et al. 2013). Designing compelling and
valuable content in order to transform passive social media
observers into active participants and collaborators is also
key capability required by firms adopting this strategy
(Holliman and Rowley 2014). Empowering customers and
letting them speak for the brand is another way to engage
customers with brands. Therefore, in this strategy, marketing
communication capabilities are important for effective marketing content development and dissemination.
Social monitoring strategy Social monitoring strategy refers
to “a listening and response process through which marketers
themselves become engaged” (Barger et al. 2016, p. 278). In
contrast with social content strategy, which is more of a
“push” communication approach with content delivered, social monitoring strategy requires the firm’s active involvement
in the whole communication process (from content delivery to
customer response) (Barger et al. 2016). More specifically,
social monitoring strategy is not only to observe and analyze
the behaviors of customers in social media (Lamberton and
Stephen 2016), but also to actively search for and respond to
customer online needs and complaints (Van Noort and
Willemsen 2012). A social monitoring strategy is thus characterized by a two-way communication process, in which the
initiation comes from customers who comment and behave on
social media, while the company takes advantage of customer
Table 3
behavior data to listen, learn, and react to its customers. Thus,
Firm versus customer motivations, activities, capabilities/resources, and outcomes in different social media marketing strategies
Type of SMMSs Primary motivations Key activities Capabilities/resources Major outcomes
Firm Customer Firm Customer Firm Customer Firm Customer
Social commerce
strategy
To promote
and sell
Utilitarian reasons
(e.g., incentives,
promotions)
Sales; Promotion Observing; Lurking Selling capability Monetary resources Product selling;
Promotion
Promotional
offerings
Social content
strategy
To connect
and collaborate
Informational,
entertainment reasons
Viral marketing;
Influential
marketing
Likes; Shares;
Comments
Marketing
communication
capability
Network assets;
Persuasion capital
WOM Entertainment
Social monitoring
strategy
To listen and learn Information,
service response
Social listening;
Responding
Complaints; Feedbacks;
Suggestions
Market sensing
and responding
capability
Knowledge stores Market knowledge Satisfaction with
firm service/
product
Social CRM
Strategy
To empower
and engage
Identification,
relationship bonds
Engage and
empower
customers
Speak for firms;
Co-creation
Social CRM capability Network assets;
Persuasion capital;
Knowledge stores;
Creativity
Customer engagement;
Co-creation
Experience
personalized
offerings
J. of the Acad. Mark. Sci. (2021) 49:51–70 59
the key objective of this strategy is to enhance customer satisfaction and cultivate stronger relationships with customers
through ongoing social media listening and responding.
With today’s abundance of attitudinal and behavioral data,
firms adopting this strategy use social media platforms as
“tools” or “windows” to listen to customer voices and gain
important market insights to support their marketing decisions
(Moe and Schweidel 2017). Moreover, Carlson et al. (2018)
argue that firms can take advantage of social media data to
identify innovation opportunities and facilitate the innovation
process. Hence, social media monitoring enables firms to assess consumers’ reactions, evaluate the prosperity of social
media marketing initiatives, and allocate resources to different
types of conversations and customer groups (Homburg et al.
2015). In other words, customers in this strategy are expected
to be active in social media interactions, providing instantaneous and real-time feedback. This has in a way helped product development and experience improvements with resource
inputs from customers’ knowledge stores.
Social monitoring strategy emphasizes the importance of
carefully listening and responding to social media activities to
have a better understanding of customer needs, gain critical
market insights, and build stronger customer relationships
(e.g., Timoshenko and Hauser 2019). It therefore requires
firms to be actively involved in the whole communication
process with customers, as customer engagement is not dependent on rewards, but is developed through the ongoing
reciprocity between the firm and its customers (Barger et al.
2016). Thus, organizational capabilities, such as marketing
sensing through effective information acquisition, interpretation and responding, are essential for the successful implementation of this strategy. More specifically, monitoring and
text analysis techniques are needed to gather and capture social media data rapidly (Schweidel and Moe 2014). Noting the
damage caused by electronic negative word of mouth (eNWOM) on social media, firms adopting this strategy also
require special capabilities to appropriately respond to customer online complaints and requests (Kim et al. 2016).
Social CRM strategy Among the four SMMSs identified, social
CRM strategy is characterized by the highest degree of strategic
maturity, because it reflects “a philosophy and a business strategy supported by a technology platform, business rules, processes, and social characteristics, designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted and transparent business environment” (Greenberg 2009, p. 34). The concept of social CRM
is designed to combine the benefits derived from both the social
media dimension (e.g., customer engagement) and the CRM
dimension (e.g., customer retention) (Malthouse et al. 2013).
In contrast with the traditional CRM approach, which assumes
that customers are passive and only contribute to customer life
value, social CRM strategy emphasizes the active role of
customers who are empowered by social media and can make
a contribution to multiple forms of value (Kumar et al. 2010). In
brief, a social CRM strategy is a form of collaborative interaction, including firm–customer, inter-organizational, and intercustomer interactions, that are intended to engage and empower
customers, so as to build mutually beneficial relationships with
the firm and lead to superior performance.
Social media have become powerful enablers of CRM
(Choudhury and Harrigan 2014). For example,
Charoensukmongkol and Sasatanun (2017) argue that the
integration of social media and CRM provides a possibility for firms to segment their customers based on similar
characteristics, and can customize marketing offerings to
the specific preferences of individual customers. With social CRM strategy, firms can enhance the likelihood of
customer engagement through one-to-one social media interactions. Customers at this stage are collaborative and
interactive in value creation, such as voluntarily providing
innovative ideas and collaborating with brands (Jaakkola
and Alexander 2014). Hence, besides resource like network assets, persuasion capital, and knowledge stores,
engaged customers also contribute their creativity resource for value co-creation.
Social CRM capability is “a firm-level capability and refers
to a firm’s competency in generating, integrating, and
responding to information obtained from customer interactions
that are facilitated by social media technologies” (Trainor et al.
2014, p. 271). Therefore, firms should be extremely creative to
combine social media data with its CRM system, as well as to
link the massive social media data on customer activities to
other data sources (e.g., customer service records) to generate
better customer-learning and innovation opportunities
(Choudhury and Harrigan 2014; Moe and Schweidel 2017).
Social CRM strategy also emphasizes the significance of reciprocal information sharing and collaborations that are supported
by the firm’s culture and commitment, operational resources,
and cross-functional cooperation (Malthouse et al. 2013;
Schultz and Peltier 2013). To sum up, social CRM capabilities,
organizational learning capabilities connected with relationship
management and innovation are essential prerequisites to building an effective social CRM strategy. Validation of proposed SMMSs
Using the previously developed classification of SMMSs (i.e.,
social commerce strategy, social content strategy, social monitoring strategy, and social CRM strategy) as a basis, we
reviewed the pertinent literature to collate useful knowledge
supporting the content of each of these strategies. Table 4
provides a summary of the key empirical insights derived
from the extant studies reviewed, together with resulting managerial lessons.
60 J. of the Acad. Mark. Sci. (2021) 49:51–70
Table 4 Key empirical insights and resulting managerial lessons derived from studies on social media marketing strategies
SMMSs Key empirical insights Resulting managerial lessons
Social commerce strategy • Social media as selling, promotion, and
advertising platform has a positive impact
on customer purchase intentions and
financial performance.
► Use social media carefully and sensibly
for the purpose of selling and promoting
products/services and this in turn will help
increase your customer base and generate
more sales.
• Interactiveness, informativeness,
entertainment, and credibility of social
media advertising positively affect
customer behavior and purchase intention.
► Make sure that your social media ads are
exciting, informative, and believable to
gain customer trust and stimulate interest
to buy your products/services.
• Social networks and interactions have a
strong influence on social media commerce.
► Leverage social networks and interactions
to motivate and engage customers to make
purchases through, for example,
monetization of social networks.
• Social media and traditional marketing
have synergistic impact on company’s sales.
► While using social media as marketing tools,
it is advisable to combine them with
traditional marketing tools to achieve
superior results.
• Perceived privacy risk and the intrusiveness
of social media advertising negatively
impact on customer attitudes and
purchase intentions.
► In using social media ads, be sensitive and
respectful to issues related to customer
privacy and intrusiveness to avoid negative
feelings by customers.
Social content strategy Content popularity and vitality are
influenced by:
• Social message strategy (e.g., brand names,
functional and emotional appeals, vividness
and interactivity, inspirational knowledge
and trending topics, content-user fit)
► To attract customer attention and spread
favorable news make your messages lively
and attractive, focus on contemporary issues,
adjust the content to target customers’
interests, and stress the strengths of your
products/services.
• Seeding strategy (e.g., use of highly connected
people, different characteristics of
relationships, influential)
► Increase virality of your messages in social
media by seeking the assistance of influential
individuals who have an extensive network,
are opinion leaders, and have the ability to
attract and easily connect with other people.
• Context (e.g., B2B, B2C), product
characteristics (e.g., low-utilitarian and
high-utilitarian), organizational processes
and IT tools
► Be aware that the popularity impact of your
social media content becomes stronger when
you have proper design processes in place
and use the right automation tools. Your viral
marketing approach should be also carefully
adapted according to your specific product
characteristics.
Social monitoring strategy • Social monitoring strategy emphasizes the
importance of social listening and
responding to customer needs.
► Listen carefully to the discussions and
comments made by customers in social media,
identify specific needs and preferences from
these, and respond accordingly and quickly
with the right company offering.
• Social media have become “listening tools” to
observe and analyze customers and firms
should adopt different techniques to analyze
social media data.
► In addition to traditional marketing research
methods, make sure you also invest adequate
time and effort in using social media as
a means to gather useful, reliable, and
fresh information about customer
attitudes/behaviors.
• Firms’ active interactions with customers
influence customer behaviors.
► Actively interacting with customers using
social media should be a never-ending
process, which, with proper monitoring and
right incentives, can help favorably influence
customer behavior.
• Different types of responses (e.g., volume
and speed), voices (e.g., human and
► To effectively stimulate positive customer
reactions in social media, it is important to SMMSs Key empirical insights Resulting managerial lessons
impersonal voice), and styles (e.g., formal
and informal) affect customer reactions.
respond swiftly and frequently, use different
voices/tones, and adapt styles to fit specifically
each communication context.
• Firm response strategies (e.g., public apology,
problem-solving responses, and
accommodative strategies) were found
useful in dealing with negative e-WOM.
► Although negative e-WOM should be avoided
by all means, in case this appears you can use
an array of tools, ranging from corporate
acknowledgment and public apology to
recovery actions and compensation.
Social CRM strategy • Customer engagement and social CRM
capabilities affect the core of social
CRM strategy, which positively affects
competitive advantage and performance.
► Put continuous emphasis on engaging your
customers in social media in a systematic and
consistent way, because this is likely to yield
favorable financial and non-financial results.
• Customer resource integration, customer
knowledge sharing, and learning are the
key foundational customer engagement
processes.
► Take initiatives to enhance the engagement
of customers in social media by integrating
resources with them, exchanging knowledge,
and learning as much as possible about their
characteristics, attitudes, and behaviors.
• Although the firm’s customer engagement
initiatives play an important role in
motivating customers’ voluntary
contributions, their effectiveness may
vary across market contexts.
► Be wary of encouraging customers to use
social media postings (especially for luxury
and identity-relevant products), because this
may harm customers’ perceptions of
premium brand image.
• Social CRM capability is a firm-level
capability that helps generate, integrate,
and respond to social media information
and enhance customer engagement.
► Develop specific capabilities (e.g., those anchored
on operational excellence, information technology,
and specific employee skills/knowledge) to
systematically collect, analyze, and act on data
derived from interactions with customers
in social media.
To validate the practical usefulness of our proposed classificatory framework of SMMSs, we first conducted a series of
in-depth interviews with 15 social media marketing practitioners, who had their own firm/brand accounts on social media platforms, at least one year of social media marketing
experience, and at least three years’ experience in their current
organization (see Web Appendix 1). Interviewees represented
companies located in China (8 companies), Finland (5 companies), and Sweden (2 companies) and involved in a variety
of industries (e.g., digital tech, tourism, food, sport). All interviews were based on a specially designed guide (which was
sent to participants in advance to prepare them for the interview) and were audiotaped and subsequently transcribed verbatim (see Web Appendix 2).
The main findings of this qualitative study are the following: (1) social media are mainly used as a key marketing
channel to achieve business objectives, which, however, differentiates in terms of product-market type, organization size,
and managerial mindset; (2) distinct differences exist across
organizations in terms of their social media initiatives to deliver content, generate reactions, and develop social CRM; (3)
there are marked variations in customer engagement levels
across participant firms, resulting from the adoption of different SMMSs; (4) the firm’s propensity to use a specific
SMMSs is enhanced by infrastructures, systems, and technologies that help to actively search, access, and integrate data
from different sources, as well as facilitate the sharing and
coordination of activities with customers; and (5) the adoption
of a specific SMMS does not follow a sequential pattern in
terms of strategic maturity development, but rather, depends
on the firm’s strategic objectives, its willingness to commit the
required resources, and the deployment of appropriate organizational capabilities.
To further confirm the existence of differences in profile
characteristics among the four types of SMMSs, we conducted an electronic survey among a sample of 52 U.S. social
media marketing managers who were randomly selected.
For this purpose, we designed a structured questionnaire incorporating the key parameters related to SMMSs, namely
firms’ strategic objectives, firms’ engagement initiatives, customers’ social media behaviors, social media resources and
capabilities required, direction of interactions, and customer
engagement levels (see Web Appendix 3).
Specifically, we found that: (1) each of the four SMMSs
emphasize different types of strategic objectives, ranging from
promoting and selling, in the case of social commerce strategy, to empowering and engaging in social CRM strategy; (2)
experiential engagement initiatives geared to customer
Table 4 (continued)
SMMSs Key empirical insights Resulting managerial lessons
impersonal voice), and styles (e.g., formal
and informal) affect customer reactions.
respond swiftly and frequently, use different
voices/tones, and adapt styles to fit specifically
each communication context.
• Firm response strategies (e.g., public apology,
problem-solving responses, and
accommodative strategies) were found
useful in dealing with negative e-WOM.
► Although negative e-WOM should be avoided
by all means, in case this appears you can use
an array of tools, ranging from corporate
acknowledgment and public apology to
recovery actions and compensation.
Social CRM strategy • Customer engagement and social CRM
capabilities affect the core of social
CRM strategy, which positively affects
competitive advantage and performance.
► Put continuous emphasis on engaging your
customers in social media in a systematic and
consistent way, because this is likely to yield
favorable financial and non-financial results.
• Customer resource integration, customer
knowledge sharing, and learning are the
key foundational customer engagement
processes.
► Take initiatives to enhance the engagement
of customers in social media by integrating
resources with them, exchanging knowledge,
and learning as much as possible about their
characteristics, attitudes, and behaviors.
• Although the firm’s customer engagement
initiatives play an important role in
motivating customers’ voluntary
contributions, their effectiveness may
vary across market contexts.
► Be wary of encouraging customers to use
social media postings (especially for luxury
and identity-relevant products), because this
may harm customers’ perceptions of
premium brand image.
• Social CRM capability is a firm-level
capability that helps generate, integrate,
and respond to social media information
and enhance customer engagement.
► Develop specific capabilities (e.g., those anchored
on operational excellence, information technology,
and specific employee skills/knowledge) to
systematically collect, analyze, and act on data
derived from interactions with customers
in social media.
62 J. of the Acad. Mark. Sci. (2021) 49:51–70
engagement were more evident at the advanced level, as opposed to the lower level strategies; (3) passive customer social
media behaviors were more characteristic of the social commerce strategy, while more active customer behaviors were
observed in the case of social CRM strategy; (4) the more
advanced the maturity of the SMMS employed, the higher
the level customer engagement, as well as the higher requirements in terms of organizational resources and specialized
capabilities; and (5) one-way interaction was associated more
with social commerce strategy, two-way interaction was more
evident in the social content strategy and the social monitoring
strategy, and collaborative interaction was a dominant feature
in the social CRM strategy (see Web Appendix 4).
Future research directions
While the extant research offers insightful information and
increased knowledge on SMMSs, there is still plenty of room
to expand this field of research with other issues, especially
given the rapidly changing developments in social media marketing practice. To gain a more accurate picture about the
future of research on the subject, we sought the opinions of
academic experts in the field through an electronically conducted survey among authors of academic journal articles
written on the subject. We specifically asked them: (1) to
suggest the three most important areas that research on
SMMSs should focus on in the future; (2) within each of the
areas suggested, to indicate three specific topics that need to
be addressed more; and (3) within each topic, to illustrate
analytical issues that warrant particular attention (see Web
Appendix 5). Altogether, we received input from 43 social
media marketing scholars who suggested 6 broad areas, 13
specific topics, and 82 focal issues for future research, which
are presented in Table 5.
Among the research issues proposed, finding appropriate
metrics to measure performance in SMMSs seems to be an
area to which top priority should be given. This is because
performance is the ultimate outcome of these strategies, for
which there is still little understanding due to the idiosyncratic
nature of social media as a marketing tool (e.g., Beckers et al.
2017; Trainor et al. 2014). In particular, it is important to shed
light on both short-term and long-term performance, as well as
its effectiveness, efficiency, and adaptiveness aspects (e.g.,
Barger et al. 2016). Another key priority area stressed by
experts in the field involves integrating to a greater extent
various strategic issues regarding each of the marketing-mix
elements in a social media context. This would help achieve
better coordination between traditional and online marketing
tools (e.g., Kolsarici and Vakratsas 2018; Kumar et al. 2017).
Respondents in our academic survey also stressed the evolutionary nature of knowledge with regard to each of the four
SMMSs and proposed multiple issues for each of them.
Particular attention should be paid to how inputs from customers and firms are interrelated in each of these strategies,
taking into consideration the central role played by customer
engagement behaviors and firm initiatives (e.g., Sheng 2019).
Respondents also pinpointed the need for more emphasis on
social CRM strategy (which is relatively under-researched),
while there should also be a closer assessment of new developments in both marketing (e.g., concepts and tools)
and social media (e.g., technologies and platforms) that
can lead to the emergence of new types of SMMSs
(e.g., Ahani et al. 2017; Choudhury and Harrigan 2014).
Respondents also noted that up to now the preparatory
phase for designing SMMSs has been overlooked, and that
therefore there is a need to shed more light on this because of
its decisive role in achieving positive results. For example,
issues relating to market/competitor analysis, macroenvironmental scanning, and target marketing should be carefully studied in conjunction with formulating sound SMMSs,
to better exploit opportunities and neutralize threats in a social
media context (e.g., De Vries et al. 2017). By contrast, our
survey among scholars in the field stressed the crucial nature
of issues relating to SMMS implementation and control,
which are of equal, or even greater, importance than those of
strategy formulation (e.g., Järvinen and Taiminen 2016). The
academics also indicated that, by their very nature, social media transcend national boundaries, thus leaving plenty of room
to investigate the international ramifications of SMMSs, using
cross-cultural research (e.g., Johnston et al. 2018).
Implications and conclusions
Theoretical implications
Given the limited research on SMMSs, this study has several
important theoretical implications. First, we are taking a step
in this new theoretical direction by providing a workable definition and conceptualization of SMMS that combines both
social media and marketing strategy dimensions. The study
complements and extends previous research (e.g., Harmeling
et al. 2017; Singaraju et al. 2016) that emphasized the value of
social media as resource integrator in exchanging customerowned resources, which can provide researchers with new
angles to address the issue of integrating social media with
marketing strategy. Such integrative efforts can have a meaningful long-term impact on building a new theory (or theories)
of social media marketing. They also point to a deeper theoretical understanding of the roles played by resource identification, utilization, and reconfiguration in a SMMS context.
We have also extended the idea of “social interaction” and
“social connectedness” in a social media context, which is
critical because the power of a customer enabled by social
media connections and interactions is of paramount
Table 5 Directions for future research on social media marketing strategies
Broad thematic areas Specific topical areas Focal issues
Preparation and
implementation
of SMMSs
SMMS situation analysis • Specific firm strengths required to support SMMSs
• The role of artificial intelligence and big data to identify social
media (SM) marketing opportunities
• Challenges encountered in SMMSs (e.g., data security)
• Analysis of competitors using similar or different SMMSs
SM target marketing • Using big data extracted from SM to identify suitable market segments
• Using SM to identify and serve niche markets
• Key network characteristics (e.g., centrality, density) to segment the SM market
• Managing effectively multiple target groups on SM
• Changes in SM targeting strategy over different stages of the product life-cycle
• Measuring the online value proposition in SM content
• The role of SM in brand differentiation and positioning
Implementing SMMSs • Adjustments in organizational structure to accommodate needs of SMMSs
• Changes in organizational culture required to support SMMSs
• Integrating existing firm systems with SMMS requirements
• HR requirements (e.g., skills, training) to support SMMSs
• How will leadership/management style influence SMMS implementation?
• How do SM technologies relate to different firm capabilities and performance outcomes?
Social commerce strategy SM and sales • How do SM impact on sales across different products, platforms, and devices?
• The role of SM as a means to improve existing products and/or develop new products
• Selecting the right pricing strategy in different SM platforms to yield higher sales
• Defining the optimal number of SM channels to achieve superior sales performance
• The impact of SM channel addition/deletion on sales
• Linking SM platform selection with distribution intensity to increase sales
• How do various types of SM (owned, earned, paid) correlate to marketing outcomes?
• How do SM and traditional marketing impact synergistically on sales/advertising
effectiveness?
SM and promotion/
advertising
• SM marketing, customer analytics, and location awareness
• How to integrate SM with traditional media to improve effectiveness
• The role of SM in the firm’s pull versus push communication strategies
• Measuring effectiveness of different types of SM ads
• How do SM interactions impact on advertisement effectiveness?
• What is the dark side of the use of SM as a promotional tool?
Social content strategy Message strategy • What is the most effective content with regard to different devices, platforms, and industries?
• Which SM messages/content can help improve branding outcomes (e.g., brand loyalty)?
• Whether customer co-creation leads to less negative inferences and more valuable virality
• What specific message strategies are needed to initiate C2C interactions to help the brand?
• Consumer reactions if learned that C2C social messages are incentivized by the firm?
• Ethical implications involved in viral marketing activity
• How to measure social content marketing performance regarding customer outcomes?
• Coping with competitors’ social content strategies
• What are the implications of an effective social content strategy on the firm’s resource
allocation?
Seeding strategy • Determinants of finding the most effective social influencers
• Customer reactions to seeding programs and their interaction with marketing mix elements
• What type of product/service and customer characteristics impact on seeding success?
• What price levels will make the influencer to engage in SM promotions and in which way?
Social monitoring strategy Listening • The role of different predictive analytics (e.g., machine learning) to get customer insights
• What are the reasons for driving firms to start with customer engagement initiatives?
• What is the best way for firms to engage and how does this impact customer engagement?
• How do customer sentiments observed in different SM venues affect performance?
• Which social listening approach (i.e., manual, fully automated, hybrid) is the most
appropriate?
Responding • Does SM ease of use and pervasiveness elicit higher customer complaints?
• How SM responding promotes WOM and enhances market/financial performance?
• Using SM to stimulate positive publicity and minimize negative publicity
• Ethical and legal considerations in firm responding
• How do individual traits, cultural factors and brand perceptions affect responding strategies?
64 J. of the Acad. Mark. Sci. (2021) 49:51–70
importance in explaining the significance of SMMSs
(Hennig-Thurau et al. 2013). More importantly, our study
suggests that firms should take the initiative to motivate and
engage customers, which will lead to wider and more extensive interactions. In particular, we show that a firm can leverage its social media usage through the use of different engagement initiatives to enforce customer interactivity and interconnectedness. Such enquiries can provide useful theoretical insights into the strategic marketing role played by social media
in today’s highly digitalized and globalized world.
We are also furthering the customer engagement literature
by proposing an SMMS developmental process. As firm–
customer relationships evolve in a social media era, it is critical to identify those factors that have an impact on customer
engagement. Although prior studies (e.g., Harmeling et al.
2017; Pansari and Kumar 2017) have demonstrated the engagement value contributed by customers and the need for
engagement initiatives taken by firms, we are extending this
idea to provide a more holistic view by highlighting the role of
insights from both firms and customers to better understand
the dynamics of SMMS formulation. We also suggest certain
theories to specifically explain the role played by each of the
components of the process in developing sound SMMSs.
We capture the unique characteristics of social media by suggesting that these networks and interactions are tightly interrelated with the outcome of SMMS, which is customer engagement. Our proposed SMMS developmental process may
therefore provide critical input for new studies focusing on
customer engagement research.
Finally, we build on various criteria to distinguish among
four SMMSs, each representing a different level of strategic
maturity. We show that a SMMS is not homogeneous, but
needs to be understood in a wider, more nuanced way, as
having different strategies relying on different goals and deriving insights from firms and their customers, ultimately
leading to different customer engagement levels. In this regard, the identification of the key SMMSs stemming from
our analysis can serve as the basis for developing specific
marketing strategy constructs and scales within a social media
context. We also indicate that different SMMSs can be implemented and yield superior competitive advantage only when
the firm is in a position to devote to it the right amount and
type of resources and capabilities (e.g., Gao et al. 2018;
Kumar and Pansari 2016).
Table 5 (continued)
Broad thematic areas Specific topical areas Focal issues
Social
CRM strategy
Customer engagement • Do various types of SM have different impact on CRM and customer engagement?
• To what degree customer engagement strength affects the performance of SM platforms?
• Customer engagement effects on product perceptions (e.g., quality, satisfaction)
• How do specific types of digital engagement practices contribute differently to brand equity?
• How do differences in modality, self-disclosure, and privacy translate to digital engagement?
• What are the most effective strategies to gain deeper and long-lasting customer engagement?
CRM capabilities • Capabilities needed to generate/integrate/reconfigure SM resources to achieve advantages
• Determinants of SM capabilities (e.g., data analysis, data synthesis, data interpretation)
• How can SM interactions be transformed into valuable marketing resources?
• How can SM data/tools be leveraged to generate customer insights and help in new product
development?
• How do social CRM strategies differ in inexperienced and experienced firms using SM?
• How do different strategic decision-making styles influence social CRM strategy outcomes?
• What resources/capabilities are needed to implement an effective social CRM strategy?
Miscellaneous Relationship marketing
aspects
• How does trust and commitment in a SM context facilitate marketing strategies?
• What kind of relational resources can be strategically used in SM?
• How is value co-created between sellers and buyers in a SM context?
• How does the intensity of SM interaction improve the quality of customer relationships?
Service marketing aspects • How is service both positioned and delivered in SM?
• How is customer service experience on SM different from the traditional service provider?
• How do service providers cope with multi-channel environments in SM?
International marketing
aspects
• The role of country institutional and regulatory effects on SMMS
• Variations in SMMS in SM platforms used solely in certain regions
• Factors influencing foreign customer preferences for global versus local SM channels
• Differences in international branding through SM channels versus traditional channels
• Drivers and performance outcomes of SMMS adaptation in foreign markets
• SM content localization versus globalization
• How do cultural factors moderate SM customer behaviors across different countries?
• What are the key factors influencing SM sales in different nations? Managerial implications
Our study also has serious implications for managers. First,
our analysis revealed that the ever-changing digital landscape
on a global scale calls for a reassessment of the ways to strategically manage brands and customers in a social media context. This requires companies to understand the different goals
for using social media and to develop their strategies accordingly. As a starting point, firms could explore customer motivations for using social media and effectively deploy the necessary resources to accommodate these motivations.
They should also think carefully about how to engage
customers when implementing their marketing strategies,
because social media become resource integrators only
when customers interact with and provide information
on them (Singaraju et al. 2016).
Managers need to set objectives at the outset to guide the
effective development, implementation, and control of
SMMSs. Our study suggests four key SMMSs achieving different business goals. For example, the goal of social commerce strategy is to attract customers with transactional interests, that of social content strategy and social monitoring strategy is to deliver valuable content and service to customers,
and that of social CRM strategy is to build mutually beneficial
customer relationships by integrating social media data with
current organizational processes. Unfortunately, many companies, especially smaller ones, tend to create their social media presence for a single purpose only: to disseminate massive
commercial information on their social media web pages in
the hope of attracting customers, even though these customers
may find commercially intensive content annoying.
This study also suggests that social media investments
should focus on the integration of social media platforms with
internal company systems to build special social media capabilities (i.e., creating, combining, and reacting to information
obtained from customer interactions on social media). Such
capabilities are vital in developing a sustainable competitive
advantage, superior market and financial performance.
However, to achieve this, firms must have the right organizational structural and cultural transformation, as well as substantial management commitment and continuous investment.
Lastly, social media have become powerful tools for CRM,
helping to transform it from traditional one-way interaction to
collaborative interaction. This implies that customer engagement means not only encouraging customer engagement on
social media, but also proactively learning from and
collaborating with customers. As Pansari and Kumar et al.
(2017) indicate, customer engagement can contribute both
directly (e.g., purchase) and indirectly (e.g., customer knowledge value) to the firm. Therefore, interacting with customers
via social media provides tremendous opportunities for firms
to learn more about their customers and opens up new possibilities for product/service co-creation.
Conclusions
The exploding use of social media in the past decade has
underscored the need for guidance on how to build SMMSs
that foster relationships with customers, advance customer
engagement, and increase marketing performance. However,
a comprehensive definition, conceptualization, and framework to guide the analysis and development of SMMSs are
lacking. This can be attributed to the recent introduction of
social media as a strategic marketing tool, while both academics and practitioners still lack the necessary knowledge
on how to convert social media data into actionable strategic
marketing tools (Moe and Schweidel 2017). This insufficiency also stems from the fact that the adoption of more advanced
SMMSs requires the possession of specific organizational capabilities that can be used to leverage social media, with the
support of a culture that encourages breaking free from obsolete mindsets, emphasizing employee skills with intelligence
in data and customer analytical insights, and operational excellence in organizational structure and business processes
(Malthouse et al. 2013).
Our study takes the first step toward addressing this issue
and provides useful guidelines for leveraging social media use
in strategic marketing. In particular, we provide a systematic
consolidation and extension of the extant pertinent SMMS
literature to offer a robust definition, conceptualization, taxonomy, and validation of SMMSs. Specifically, we have amply demonstrated that the mere use of social media alone does
not generate customer value, which instead is attained through
the generation of connections and interactions between the
firm and its customers, as well as among customers themselves. These generated social networks and influences can
subsequently be used strategically for resource transformation
and exchanges between the interacting parties. Our conceptualization of the SMMS developmental process also suggests
that firms first need to recognize customers’ motivations to
engage in brand-related social media activities and encourage
their voluntary contributions.
Although the four SMMSs identified in our study (i.e.,
social commerce strategy, social content strategy, social
monitoring strategy, and social CRM strategy) denote
progressing levels of strategic maturity, their adoption
does not follow a sequential pattern. As our validation
procedures revealed, this will be determined by the firm’s
strategic objectives, resources, and capabilities. Moreover,
the success of the various SMMSs will depend on the
firm’s ability to identify and leverage customer-owned
resources, as in the case of transforming customers from
passive receivers of the firm’s social media offerings to
active value contributors. It will also depend on the firm’s
willingness to allocate resources in order to foster collaborative conversations, develop appropriate responses, and
enhance customer relationships. These will all ultimately
66 J. of the Acad. Mark. Sci. (2021) 49:51–70
help to build a sustainable competitive advantage and enhance business performance.
Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank the Editor, the Area
Editor, and the three anonymous Reviewers for their constructive
comments, insightful suggestions, and supportive guidance provided during the review process.
Funding Information Open access funding provided by University of
Vaasa (UVA).