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Social Media at a Small Business

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Student-ID: H00172723
Course Title: Critical Writing and analysis
Course Code: C07CP
Assignment Title: ‘Final Essay’

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Social media at small businesses

Introduction

Social media is defined ‘as the way in which people interact to create, share, and exchange information and ideas in virtual communities and networks’ (Katona & Sarvary, 2014). Few of the most common social media platforms are differentiated into social networks (such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, instant messaging), collaboration networks (examples: slideshare, Wikipedia, Prezi, Google docs, Zoho docs, survey monkey), image sharing (Instagram, Flickr, Pinterest and Picasa), blogging (Tumblr, Blogger and Word-press), micro-blogging (Twitter) and video-sharing platform (YouTube, Blip and Vimeo). Apple does not use Facebook or Twitter for social media marketing because it is a multinational corporation, but not every business is as large scale and successful as Apple. Social media now represents a new horizon of marketing opportunities to businesses. Marketing is a practice, which establishes what products or services the customers might be interested in. Social media supports the development of marketing of businesses, to have a different perception about the brand; this allows creative methods to implement basic marketing. Social media marketing provides the tools that the businesses needs to be able to observe discussions through the internet efficiently (Assaad and Gómez, 2011). According to Gamboa and Gonçalves (2014) social media marketing has increased customer loyalty, satisfaction, perceived value, and commitment.
He et al, (2014) mentioned that each country has different variation of what is small business; therefore, after reading numerous literatures, most of the authors agree as an enterprise with less than 100 employees. Small businesses in the past,

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