What different types of Facebook marketing objectives are there, and what tactics can you use to reach those.

Abstract

Social media is creating attractive business opportunities for brands and companies worldwide. It is because of the huge amount of businesses and costumers on Facebook, which reflects the importance of research on future marketing. The purpose of this dissertation is first to identify different types of marketing objectives on Facebook, and secondly to identify tactics to reach the different objectives. We conducted an inductive and a deductive approach based on a grounded theory method. Grounded theory differs from other qualitative methods because of the explicit guidelines that explain researchers how to proceed. We conduct eight in-depth interviews with four different communication agencies and four different businesses already integrated in social media marketing on Facebook. We built concepts and categories based on grounded theory and built a theory for our purpose of this dissertation. To get some more verification of our grounded theory we approached a Norwegian software agency that works with building platforms for creating Facebook applications. We analysed data given to us by the agency and compared their data with ours. Our findings suggest that sales, branding, customer service and conversions, are the overlying objectives businesses can achieve on Facebook. All of these objectives have more specified objectives underlying them, and to reach these objectives on Facebook our findings suggest four important success factors. It is important for businesses to define and gather their audience on Facebook in order to achieve any of the objectives, and they need to communicate their brand and create value on their Facebook page. It is a constant battle on Facebook to entertain your audience through engaging content. In order to know what your audience thinks is engaging, our data suggest that constant research on your audience is importuning. We create a model for engaging content based on our findings, and define tactical elements to achieve the different objectives. Our findings contribute to earlier research on social media objectives and create an overview of the objectives that can be achieved on Facebook. We believe that our findings will help businesses to make better decisions in their future marketing campaigns and strategies.