Digital Links
The Effect of Social Media Influencers on Omanis’ Purchasing Habits
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ahmed Al Saadi
Social media plays a pivotal role nowadays. Physical distance created by lands and oceans no longer limits people who have totally different backgrounds to get in touch with each other in various sectors of life since the invention of Web 2.0 or Social media. For instance, most recently it has been noticed that social media generally brought with it windows of opportunities for entrepreneurs that surpass local boundaries. Even thought the uses of social media are important and globally, they have changed the whole scenario in business, but it's still an under researched area. There are several Omani studies focused on the uses and gratification of social media, but the attitude of Omanis toward those who called social media influencers has not been empirically investigated. Therefore this study aims to fill up the gap by identifying to which extent Omani citizens use social media to look for ads, in addition discovering if there is any relationship between their purchasing habits and social media influencers, or not. This study has adopted a descriptive survey method to gather data from the samples through distribution of electronic questionnaires that have both open- end and close ended questions. The sample of this research is comprised of 150 Omanis from those who are buying products and services by using social media. Moreover some social media influencers platforms which are utilized to promote products and services are browsed and analyzed.
Social Change through Social Media: A Content Analysis of an International NGO's Social Media Photo Posts in One Year
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Nhi Phuoc Thuc Le
The burgeoning of NGOs all over the world have led them to become more commercialised, placing much importance on public relations, communicating their corporate identity and organisational values. Social media is becoming more and more commonly used for this purpose. This study explores how an international NGO communicates its purpose through its photo posts on Instagram, the social media platform where the NGO receives more engagement from its followers. The study utilises quantitative and qualitative visual content analysis to analyse a calendar year’s (2018) worth of photo posts along with their captions. The analysis helps to identify the elements that the NGO uses in its photos and captions to convey its purpose, as well as the values it tries to communicate. The findings of this study provide insight into how international NGOs can better communicate their purpose and values with their publics through social media.
Viral Marketing Success: Impact of Weak Ties on Content Propagation
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Katia Campbell, Daphne Simmonds
Viral marketing involves creating electronic content such as a video or text message and “seeding” it to initially targeted persons (Ho and Dempsey 2010), who then, are expected to view and forward said content to others in their network(s). In cases where the content is forwarded from one set of receivers to others and very quickly reach a large group of persons at an exponential rate (Palka and Pousttchi 2008), diffusion is considered to be viral (Hoang and Lim 2012). In this paper, we aim to present a discussion of our investigation of virality success. In particular, our study will focus on successful propagation of the message such that virality is achieved. Wiedemann (2007) found that viral campaigns are most successful when they are seeded with consumers who have strong ties with the message originator. Given the goal of reaching exponentially large numbers of recipients, and the recommendation to avoid forwarders with large numbers of contacts based on the potential for weak ties, we ask the following question: How can marketers overcome the effect of weak ties to achieve viral propagation of their content? Our investigation involves a review of the viral marketing success literature as well as of relevant theories to develop a research model that will guide our investigation of the key challenges related to this question. We conduct a case study to investigate our model propositions.
