Going Real-Time in no time? : – en kvantitativ och kvalitativ studie i hur Sveriges största annonsörer använder sociala medier och Real-Time Marketing.

Sammanfattning: Background: Our daily lives and personal interactions are increasingly featuring social media and social networks in particular. Topics regarding social media, its impact on society at large – both on corporate as well as individual behavior – has been the focus of many research papers. Personal use of social networks are regularly being mapped out by researchers aiming at clarifying concepts such as engagement, trust and interactivity, and mapped by companies seeking to maximize return on investment concerning their marketing efforts. The aim of our study is (i) to map how companies and/or organizations operating on the Swedish market use their company’s pages on the social media as a way of communicating with their followers and audience, as well as (ii) identifying whether “Real-Time Marketing”, in our own definition, is used or not. Methods: The research methods used included both quantitative and qualitative content analysis. Data was collected from Facebook and Twitter pages belonging to five companies operating on the Swedish market that are among Sweden’s largest advertisers. The data, in total 1981 updates, was analyzed in order to map out patterns and to summarize all the relevant companies’ communicative activities. Subsequently, the data was qualitatively evaluated to gain deeper understanding of the activities to uncover techniques such as semiotics and usage of social media as a way to communicate with audience and customers. Results: Results show that companies that are among Sweden’s largest advertisers mainly use Facebook and Twitter as means of publicizing information with the intent of enhancing their own brands. Our quantitative analyses concluded that the second and third most frequent updates were advertising and customer service. The results of the qualitative analyses show that companies adapt their semiotics to a more informal use of language, but fail to engage in dialogs and to stimulate their audience to increased interaction with the brand. Results also demonstrate that only one update featured the technique “Real-Time Marketing”, which suggests that “Real-Time Marketing”, in our definition, is scarcely used on the Swedish market.