Social Media and Business

The current report intends to evaluate the use of social media in the modern day business organisations. For simplifying the purpose of this report, focus has been kept on the Australian retail industry, as it is one of the fastest growing global industrial sectors. More specifically, Woolworths Group has been chosen as one of the organisations listed under ASX, as it is operating in the retail industry of Australia. It is one of the leading retail organisations placed after Wesfarmers in Australia in terms of revenue having other interests in liquor, hotel and gaming poker machines as well (Woolworthsgroup.com.au, 2018). 

In the current era, most of the business organisations use social media for spreading consumer awareness about the products offered and services rendered (Dong & Wu, 2015). The first segment of the paper would concentrate on the use of social media in the context of the Australian retail industry with special emphasis on Woolworths Group. Finally, the report would shed light on accumulating the relevant data of the Australian retail industry over the years, which would be presented as a graph. Accordingly, discussions would be made to identify the future opportunities for the industry and the organisation likely to occur in future.

Social media and business:

The significance of social media in all types of business organisations are growing at warp speed. Due to such amazing growth, every organisation is required to leverage suitable social media channels in the most effective manner. The Australian retail industry including Woolworths Group is not an exception to this fact as well. Currently, the adults using social media from global nations have been 69%, which was only 7% in 2005. In addition, the use of social media on mobile devices is increasing by nearly 30% every year and above 2 million business organisations utilise Facebook advertising in order to promote their products and services.

In the context of the Australian retail industry and Woolworths Group, social media could be used in a variety of ways, which are enumerated briefly as follows:

Lower cost of advertisements:

In contrast to conventional advertising procedures like television, social advertisements, print media and radio advertisements, social advertisements are considered as a cheaper medium (Agnihotri et al., 2016). Moreover, Woolworths could involve in different social media channels free of cost before scaling with paid advertisements.

Targeted reach:

The Australian retail industry could not avail the opportunity to reach their target customers by using traditional advertising tools; however, social media advertisements offer such opportunity (Çifci et al., 2016). This is because offline advertising might lead to dismal returns for the Australian retail industry and Woolworths, even if huge investments are made. With the help of social media advertisements, Woolworths could reach to its targeted prospects, raise its conversions and thus, a higher return on investment would be ensured.

Real time performance analysis:

In order to know that the advertising is effective or not, it is necessary to find out the issues for improving it further. When the organisations operating in the Australian retail industry are conducting offline advertising campaigns, it is not possible to analyse the performance of advertisement campaigns (He et al., 2015). On the other hand, with the help of social media advertising, Woolworths Group could monitor the performance of its various advertising campaigns. It becomes possible to change advertisements on the fly and the results could be seen instantaneously.

Data and Business

For instance, an example of IKEA is considered, whose objective is to promote a new store without spending any kind of budget at all. The approach of this objective is to upload the photos of the rooms in the Facebook page of IKEA after which the people could tag them against a furniture item for the chance to win the same as lottery. This type of advertising is immensely beneficial for the Australian retail industry and Woolworths Group, as it would help in leveraging the overall cost as well as reaching out to the target audience at a faster rate (Kim, Lim & Brymer, 2015).

Data and business:

The above figure mainly helps in depicting the number of users using social network in Australia from 2015 to 2022. By the end of 2022, it is estimated that the social network users would increase to 19.27 million from 17.70 million in 2018. Several reasons are deemed to be inherent for rise in social media over the years. The most active users could be found in Facebook having the strongest potential to optimise the reach of content. In Facebook, there is average of 10.7% post reach against page like and 26.8% average paid post reach against overall reach. Hence, Facebook is an effective social platform for the retail organisations operating in Australia having significant potential reach for targeting content to business personas to obtain quality leads (Piotrowicz & Cuthbertson, 2014).

In accordance with the above figure, it could be observed that the number of social media users is expected to increase every year. Therefore, Woolworths Limited could concentrate on social media marketing like Twitter and Instagram marketing for interacting with the potential customer base. By evaluating the tweets updates and status of the targeted customers, it is possible to obtain overview of the daily lives of the customers and their behaviours. The organisation could obtain answers from the users like the products they buy, their hobbies and the websites they visit. After obtaining the responses, the organisations operating in the Australian retail industry could write better posts and contents resulting in additional traffic. The benefits could be far reaching and beyond marketing, as the customer main points could be identified, sales conversions could be improved and product strategy could be refined.

As the retail organisations mainly provide different types of products to their customers, it is obvious that the customers would face problems with some of the products bought or services rendered to them (Verhoef, Kannan & Inman, 2015). However, only a few organisations operating in the Australian retail industry are fulfilling these expectations. For Woolworths Group to enjoy competitive advantage, it could design a customer complaint page in Facebook, in which the customers could comment on the issues faced with any product purchased from the organisation. Accordingly, the feedbacks need to be acknowledged and proper replies need to be provided in order to ensure their satisfaction level. However, Woolworths needs to find additional professionals for dealing with such customer complaints, as the social media users are expected to increase heavily in future.

Conclusion

Conclusion:

Based on the above discussion, it could be stated that the significance of social media in all types of business organisations are growing at warp speed. Due to such amazing growth, every organisation is required to leverage suitable social media channels in the most effective manner.

Social advertisements are considered as a cheaper medium in contrast to conventional advertising procedures like television, social advertisements, print media and radio advertisements. Moreover, Woolworths could involve in different social media channels free of cost before scaling with paid advertisements. In order to know that the advertising is effective or not, it is necessary to find out the issues for improving it further. When the organisations operating in the Australian retail industry are conducting offline advertising campaigns, it is not possible to analyse the performance of advertisement campaigns.

On the other hand, with the help of social media advertising, Woolworths Group could monitor the performance of its various advertising campaigns. Finally, it has been evaluated that the social media users are expected to increase significantly by the end of 2022, which would necessitate the need for the retail firms to focus more on social media advertising. Woolworths conduct surveys in Facebook to know about the tastes and preferences of the clients and accordingly, modifications could be made to tailor the needs of the customers. The benefits could be far reaching and beyond marketing, as the customer main points could be identified, sales conversions could be improved and product strategy could be refined.

References:

Agnihotri, R., Dingus, R., Hu, M. Y., & Krush, M. T. (2016). Social media: Influencing customer satisfaction in B2B sales. Industrial Marketing Management, 53, 172-180.

Çifci, S., Ekinci, Y., Whyatt, G., Japutra, A., Molinillo, S., & Siala, H. (2016). A cross validation of Consumer-Based Brand Equity models: Driving customer equity in retail brands. Journal of Business Research, 69(9), 3740-3747.

Dong, J. Q., & Wu, W. (2015). Business value of social media technologies: Evidence from online user innovation communities. The Journal of Strategic Information Systems, 24(2), 113-127.

He, W., Shen, J., Tian, X., Li, Y., Akula, V., Yan, G., & Tao, R. (2015). Gaining competitive intelligence from social media data: Evidence from two largest retail chains in the world. Industrial management & data systems, 115(9), 1622-1636.

He, W., Wu, H., Yan, G., Akula, V., & Shen, J. (2015). A novel social media competitive analytics framework with sentiment benchmarks. Information & Management, 52(7), 801-812.

Kim, W. G., Lim, H., & Brymer, R. A. (2015). The effectiveness of managing social media on hotel performance. International Journal of Hospitality Management, 44, 165-171.

Piotrowicz, W., & Cuthbertson, R. (2014). Introduction to the special issue information technology in retail: Toward omnichannel retailing. International Journal of Electronic Commerce, 18(4), 5-16.

Smith, A., & Anderson, M. (2018). Social Media Use in 2018. Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech. Retrieved 15 August 2018, from https://www.pewinternet.org/2018/03/01/social-media-use-in-2018/

Statista.com. (2018). Australia – number of social network users 2022 | Statistic. Statista. Retrieved 15 August 2018, from https://www.statista.com/statistics/247946/number-of-social-network-users-in-australia/

Verhoef, P. C., Kannan, P. K., & Inman, J. J. (2015). From multi-channel retailing to omni-channel retailing: introduction to the special issue on multi-channel retailing. Journal of retailing, 91(2), 174-181.

Woolworthsgroup.com.au. (2018). Woolworths Group: Quality Brands and Trusted Retailing. Retrieved 15 August 2018, from https://www.woolworthsgroup.com.au/