Social media and the impact on marketing communication

Since Internet usage has been increasing so much in the last 15 years, and particularly in the last 10 years, many companies have found new possibilities to promote their products. These new approaches are mainly used as a communication tool and are called social media. The purpose of this thesis has been to study how social media influence the marketing communication of companies. The methodology behind this research, in order to ensure a suitable and viable data collection, was personal interviews with two manufacturing companies, one social network platform and one marketing agency. The method was a qualitative research approach combining different case studies in the research strategy. The diverse interview partners were each given a specific interview guide synchronized to their field of business and afterwards these four cases were analyzed using the data collected from the personal interviews and the mentioned interview guides. The overall result of this thesis was that the communication via social media is still in the early stages of its development. Basically companies approve social media as an effective tool to exceed and support marketing communication. Furthermore social media monitoring is an important component, but is still in the early stages. Generally companies approve social media as an effective tool to exceed and support marketing communication. Social media still has huge growth potentials regarding the differentiation and specification of different platforms, because not all of them are suitable for every company.Validerat; 20101217 (root