استراتژی های ساختار برند رسانه های اجتماعی در شرکت های B2B Social media brand building strategies in B2B companies

Introduction Social media, including social network sites, have become important digital meeting places for friends and acquaintances and are now viewed as significant communication arenas (Harrigan, 2011). Social media support a range of social activities, including blogging, microblogging, photo-sharing, social networking, and videosharing (Centeno et al., 2009). They offer two-way communications, the opportunity for individuals and businesses to capitalise on people’s networks, and a rich digital space for the exchange of electronic word of mouth (eWOM) (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2011). In late 2014, there were 1.35 billion Facebook users, 284 million Twitter users, 1 billionYoutube users, and 332 million LinkedIn users (www.statista.com). Accordingly, businesses and their marketers are increasingly viewing social media as an additional marketing channel through which they can communicate or interact with their customers and prospective customers (Gummerus et al., 2011; Stelzner, 2013). Evidence of successful brand presence in social media (Edelman, 2010; Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010), the size of the potential audience, plus the level of interactivity available in social media channels, drives business interest in social media. Particularly, for business-toconsumer (B2C) firms, research shows that social media have changed the tools and strategies that companies use to communicate, promote their brand and create brand communities (Christdoulides, 2009; Kaplan and Haelein, 2010; Mangold and Faulds, 2009). Even more significantly, there is increasing recognition that in the open source branding context of social media, brand owners must relinquish control, and develop approaches that negotiate the tensions associated with the co-creation of the brand, with concomitant consequences for accepted branding truths and theories (Christodoulides, 2009; Fournier and Avery, 2011). Consistent with this there have been various calls for further research into the commercial use of social network sites, to contribute towards the development of a theoretical foundation for marketing and brand building in this arena (Beer, 2008; Fuchs, 2009; Gensler et al., 2013; Gummerus et al., 2011; Hennig-Thurau et al., 2010; Kim and Ko, 2012; Laroche et al., 2013; Rokka et al., 2014).