Background

Discuss about the Importance of Businesses to Stay Active on Social Media – A Case of Starbucks.

Background of the study

The significance of social media in business is increasing rapidly. By giving social media touch to the business brand, customers are connected in better way and get chance to serve them on a higher level. According to an info-graphic published by Ambassador, there are 71% customers are likely recommending to a brand to a different person whether they have a positive experience on social media (Wamba and Carter, 2016, p.792). There are 2 million business today utilizes Facebook advertising for promotion of products as well as service. Social media posts provide a scope for public to find new web content as well as click through the site.  

In this perspective, Starbucks added 710,000 new Facebook followers. The history of the procedure defining the company as a brand is interesting (Wamba and Carter, 2016, p.794). Starbucks retains cult status utilizing a mix of marketing technique where social media plays an important role. Hence, it becomes significant analyzing significance of social media on the business. In the study, Starbucks is selected as case study organization.

The research will have aim to evaluate the significance of business to stay active on social media. In addition, the success factors of a business, advantages and limitations will be described in the paper.

The research will have the following objectives:

• To find out the critical success factors of a business
• To evaluate the advantages of using social media in the business of Starbucks
• To critically assess the limitations involved with the use of social media in the business of Starbucks
• To recommend solutions for overcoming the issues faced while using social media in the business of Starbucks

The research will have the following question.

• How the issues can be overcome faced while using social media in the business of Starbucks?

Social media is considered as new buzz in the field of marketing of a business. The organizations are jumping for creating new ways to attract and retain customers. Social media is one of the platforms that help the organizations to meet that objective by making friends, connections as well as followers (Yang et al., 2016, p.528). In addition, building communities in virtual space on social media helps to expand business of an organization. Social media becomes a game changer for business. The organizations invested early for harnessing power of social media claims higher rate of returns with greater outcomes predicted to be on the way. Hence, it becomes significant analyzing the importance of social media on Starbucks.

On the other hand, social media is defined as an instrument, which can be helpful to communicate and make interaction. In addition, social media is considered as a tool utilized for communication like television, newspaper as well as radio. Social media is helpful for making social interaction utilizing high accessible as well as scalable techniques of communication. Social media is the utilization of web-based as well as mobile technologies in order to turn communication into making interactive dialogues. Social media applications are developed on technological and ideological foundations of web 2.0. It produces user-generated content. Hence, using the importance of social media on business performance is required to analyze that will be achieved in the research paper.

Objectives

An increasing number of Indian organizations are utilizing social media as an effective business tool. With the help of social media, there are 83% organizations across in Oman agreed that without the activities of social media, marketing strategies cannot be successful. In addition, 74% organizations endorse the view as per the survey by Regus, a leading solutions provider for office space (Kumar and Reinartz, 2018). On the other hand, there are 61% global organizations focused on the requirement for a balance of marketing media and confirming belief without combining traditional as well as digital techniques.

However, advertising through social media develops a small part of marketing strategy of a brand. However, the increase of social network audience is 250% year driven through Facebook and Twitter. In addition, there are several activities taken by the global organizations like Adobe, Dell and IBM like holding consumer interest by engaging advertisements on social networks. However, some issues like privacy and security are the issues for the organization in order to stay active on social media. Hence, it is required to analyze the importance of social business for the business of Starbucks.

Internet connects the world as well as makes communication fast as well as simple. Social media as well as social networking have changed the business landscape. Benefits from the utilization of websites as well as social media sites consist of an increase of awareness as well as inquiries that helps to improve relationships with the customers. The chapter describes the key factors responsible for success of a business. In addition, the advantages as well as limitations of social media in the business of Starbucks are explained in this chapter.

Business management is one of the most important aspect in terms of completion of tasks in order to maintain the efficiency of the business processing. In order to maintain business management terminologies that has positive aspects are as follows: –

• Social media
• Project management
• Business scope management
• Risk analysis

Out of all these terminologies, social media has been acting as one of the major source that has been adversely affecting business proceeding. This is the major reason that usage of social media has been gradually increasing throughout the globe (Kumar and Reinartz, 2018). Social media has been acting as a platform, that ensures communication between individuals located anywhere in the globe. Communication has been a lot easier since the introduction of social media. Through exploring the importance of social media for business, it is required to improve the quality of life in business as well as society. In addition, social media helps to increase brand awareness, humanize the brand and develop the brand being a thought leader. Social media also helps to increase website traffic, develop leads and boost sales of the organization.

Importance of Social Media on Business

 Major advantages of using social media in business management are as follows: –

Increase in brand awareness: Social media acts as the most cost efficient platform to increase brand awareness of a particular organization. Because number of users of social media is very high, exposure to brands are relatively higher than any other platform that performs brand endorsing. Brand endorsing ensures the fact that global audience gets accustomed with products and services that are manufactured by the particular brand. Social media as well as social networking have change landscape of business for the organizations adopted in the process. The It allows the users becoming curators of the interesting content that are found in the process. Social media advertising becomes one of the important aspects for today’s business.

Traditional advertising does not provide luxury for reaching out the target audience. Using social media advertising helps to reach out to the targeted prospects. It also helps to increase conversions as well as ultimately getting a high return on the investment. Understanding the ad working or not is considered as integral for enhancing the process. It cripples massive efforts in the process. On the other hand, ads of social media allow keeping track of the process. It is significant for the business of all types in order to understand the business. There are several businesses dismissing it as one of the ways for making the brand. However, several reputable marketing officers agree that social media has an important impact on brand awareness. Before starting emphasizing on a specific social platform, finding the target audience is required on it. Thus, images as well as videos act as an important role in helping the business growing the brand awareness on the social media. However, social media is considered regarding developing the conversations. In addition, social media is helpful to measure the efforts and use the tracking tools provided through the platforms.  

 In case brands fail to endorse themselves in global basis, sales of products add services manufactured by them decreases. Advertisement is the major reason behind success of brands. With the help of advertisement business management, business management increases efficiency in business prosecution (Guesalaga, 2016, p.78). In case advertisement of a particular brand is not performed in an efficient way, the brand fails to exploit global audience and sales of their product and services gets bound to a limit as people all over globe. It is not very much accustomed with the specifications of products that the brand is manufacturing, leading to the fact, which global audience tends to avoid the brand as proper knowledge regarding the brand and their products and services are not very well known to global audience.

Advantages of Using Social Media in Business Management

Understanding the trend: in case of launching new products, the major issue that one faces is that the trend is already set gets ahead of the manufactured product, which makes the product to be outdated. In case the product gets outdated, buyers will never opt for that product as buyers will get updated products from other brands. In case the brand gets idea of the trend that is already set before manufacturing of products, the organization will definitely focus on the flaws that they are having and rectify them. Understanding the trends also acts as a reference during manufacturing of the products. This help brands to manufacture products that are ready enough and are capable enough to capture the market and do good business.   

Understanding the competition: social media also helps in recognizing competition of a particular brand. In case one or more brands are manufacturing same kind of products, it is very obvious that there will be severe competition among all the brands present. This is because products that are being manufactured are similar in nature. This ensures the fact that audience gets differentiated among the brands. To attract most audience, major way out is that product that is being manufactured must be unique in nature. To make products unique in nature, one must be aware of specifications that are being provided in products that are manufactured by rival organizations.

Understanding demands of buyers: The most important feature of social media is that it helps in understanding the demands of the clients of organization (White, 2016). This understanding of demands of clients helps the organization to realize kind of products that the organization needs to manufacture to have an upper hand in market over their rivals.

Feedback:  Feedback acts as one of the most important feature that helps the brand to grow in quality as well as quantity. Users who has been using products of the brand are told to share their views regarding the product over social media platform. Organizations uses these reviews as their reference to increase the quality of their products. Feedback also helps in implementing innovations during manufacturing of the product. Feedback also helps in understanding flaws that are present currently in products. This helps in improving weak aspects of products.

Understanding potential clients: on conducting surveys organization can understand demands of global mass that will help in understanding needs and wants of mass in a whole. This will help in communicating with their potent clients who might become stakeholders in future (Sigala, 2016). By meeting their demands, organizations convert potential clients to real life clients and earn revenue from them.

Understanding the Trend

Staying Connected with clients: staying connected with clients is the most vital features of social media. The process of staying connected with clients helps brands to convey their message to their clients. Brands are able to inform about their whereabouts to keep their clients updated regarding their upcoming products (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2016). Organizations can also conduct surveys t add modifications to products according to the results of the survey`

Despite all the advantages that brands enjoy due to social media there are also several disadvantages of social media, leading to the fact that organizations using social media gets negatively affected. The major disadvantages are as follows: –

Creating false impression: competitors of a particular brand can use social media against the brand as spreading news with help of social media is really easy. It takes least time to spread hoax regarding a brand with help of social media (Dijkmans, Kerkhof and Beukeboom, 2015, p.60). Social media is a platform that is used by millions and billions of users, so it gets easy for rivals to spread wrong information. Acceptance of information of people over social media is very high.

Leaking of information: a major disadvantage of using social media in business management is that data regarding development of a new product gets leak by means of social (Wamba and Carter, 2016). In case an innovative idea is implemented and that news gets spread over social media, that idea is cultivated by other rival companies as well, leading to fierce competition and lack of uniqueness in products.

There have been several studies conducted for understanding the significance as well as requirement of a business to be related to social media. Present chapter analyzes the advantages and limitations of using social media in Starbucks. In addition, the impact of using social media in Starbucks is discussed in this chapter of research.

In order to evaluate critically the importance of business of Starbucks to stay active on social media, the researcher from different sources like websites, blogs and National Library reviews various books, journals and websites.

Research philosophy processes sources, nature and establishment of knowledge. It follows the ways towards the phenomenon requires to be collected, analyzed as well as used in the research (Mackey and Gass, 2015). On the other hand, the idea of creating knowledge in the research is achieved through research philosophy. Research philosophy has reflection in making important assumptions as well as serves as the base of research strategy. Positivism philosophy will be selected as the research is highly structured and will contain large samples. In addition, as the measurement will be quantitative in nature, selection of positivism philosophy will be the best suited for the research.

Understanding the Competition

Deductive, inductive and abductive are three types of research approaches used in a research. In the research, deductive approach will be selected in the research for having a number of causes. Selection of the topic will be helpful to generalize the research from general to specific. Data collection will be utilized for assessment of propositions and hypothesis associated with the existing theory.

Vaioleti (2016) stated that research design could be divided into several groups such as descriptive, exploratory and conclusive. According to exploratory research design, it aims for exploring particular aspects of the research. The aim of exploratory research is to produce insights regarding the situation. In the research, descriptive research design as it will be helpful verifying insights as well as help in selecting the course of action.

In order to collect data for the research, the researcher will select online survey questionnaires. It will assists in developing interface of the quantitative data for assessing the importance of social media. Based on online survey questionnaires, the employees of Starbucks will be selected for the research. It will be helpful to comprehending the influence of social media on the business of Starbucks.

In order to develop survey questionnaires, the researcher will develop self-completion structured questionnaire. The 20-structured questionnaire will be helpful to analyze the importance of business to stay active on social media in Starbuck. In addition, in order to conduct the survey, the researcher will use close-ended questionnaires related to the topic. Apart from this, layout of the questions will be developed based on usability, interactivity, content as well as design. In order to gather data, it will be required to select a group of people who have experience regarding business impact.

In the research, non-probability sampling technique will be used. It will be helpful in convincing the sampling process as the data collection procedure is dependent on researcher.  In addition, as the samples are available for collection of data, the method will be appropriate and suitable for the research. On the other hand, 80 employees of Starbucks will be selected for the research.

In order to analyze the data gathered for the research through online survey questionnaire, Microsoft Excel sheet will be used. After entering the data into particular spreadsheet, several methods will be used by the researcher in order to analyze the impact of social media on the business of Starbucks.

 During conduction of the research, a researcher requires following a code of conduct. It will be helpful to identify right and wring set of tools adopted in the process. The researcher to analyze the role of social media on the business of Starbucks will try to follow ethical considerations, which will be helpful to add standards to the topic of research.

Understanding Demands of Buyers

Data application:

Data obtained through the study assists in comprehending present impact of social media on business of Starbucks. However, any types of commercial applications of the collected data will be avoided.

Involvement of respondents:

The researcher will try inserting external influences on pressure over the respondents taking part in the feedback process. Respondents having voluntary participation will be encouraged participating in the research.

The chapter of the research will explain several research tools of selection. It will be helpful to analyze the research in better way. In addition, the researcher will try to align the nature of study with the variable research technique. It will be helpful to frame the best-suited methodology for the research.

References

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Guesalaga, R., (2016) ‘The use of social media in sales: Individual and organizational antecedents, and the role of customer engagement in social media’. Industrial Marketing Management, 54, pp.71-79.   

Kaplan, A.M. and Haenlein, M., (2016) ‘Higher education and the digital revolution: About MOOCs, SPOCs’, social media, and the Cookie Monster’. Business Horizons, 59(4), pp.441-450.

Kumar, V. and Reinartz, W., 2018. Customer relationship management: Concept, strategy, and tools. 3^rd edn. Springer:Berlin.

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Mackey, A. and Gass, S.M., 2015. Second language research: Methodology and design. 4^th edn. Routledge: Abingdon.

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Sigala, M., 2016. Introduction to Part 1. In Social Media in Travel, Tourism and Hospitality (pp. 29-32). Routledge: Abingdon.

Vaioleti, T.M., (2016) Talanoa research methodology: A developing position on Pacific research. Waikato Journal of Education, 12(1). pp.417-479

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Wamba, S.F. and Carter, L., (2016). ‘Social media tools adoption and use by SMEs: An empirical study’. In Social media and Networking: Concepts, methodologies, tools, and applications, 11(6), pp. 791-806

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