Question

Emergence of social media marketing in banking sector: Rak Bank plc (UAE)

Back ground & Academic Context:

In the contemporary environment, social media marketing is a latest component of marketing businesses. According to Cook (2008), social media is the practices of expending the social contracts of a business organization. Social media is the popular web tools that facilitate online conversation and interaction with millions of people to share ideas, insights, and experiences but with self owned class of participants (Weinberg, 2009). Social media marketing play an important role in the current contemporary environment. It makes easy to access online information in a less time. It assists to save money and time (Shao, 2007). It also assists to enhance relationship with large group of persons.

Social media marketing is used to achieve several goals and objectives. It assists to increase the traffic at company website. It helps to an organization to increase its word-of-mouth publicity (Shih, 2009). Social media marketing assist to a customer to share relevant information with persons of own community. Social media marketing provides quick and significant information rather than tradition marketing practices (Hazlett, 2010). Face book, Twitter, Flicker, MySpace, LinkedIn, You Tube etc are newest social media vehicle that entice both consumers and marketers (Pitta, 2010). In the recessionary period, social media marketing assists to marketer to reach target audiences effectively and efficiently and at a low cost with compared to traditional media.

According to Pitta (2010), it suggests that social media are useful for listening, talking, energizing and supporting consumers. It also assists to increase sales of the organization by communicating and maintain relationship with target audience (Hazlett, 2010). In contrast, the key disadvantage of marketer has the loss of control over the message and the lack of metrics to measure the effect on brand awareness and usage. According to Pitta (2010), several marketing media are fighting to generate revenues.
In the current market scenario, technology advancement is increasing rapidly. Customers and marketers are using internet. Several banks use social media marketing as a tool to improve organization efficiency. Banks use social media marketing to build relationship with communities rather than to sell anything online. Social media marketing also beneficial for product research through awareness about customers that can lead to competitive advantage.

Social media marketing also assists to real time and easy customer service. In the similar way, social media works as promotional and marketing tools. The key advantage of social media marketing is that it provides a way to represent the transparent picture of the organization to its customers (Weinberg, 2009). It assists to increase the customer loyalty with the organization due to real information of the organization.

For example, Bank of America and several banks use twitter as a tool of social media marketing. Twitter is used to resolve the problems and real time information to its global customers (Bank of America, 2010). It works in the favor of the society to share real information with them. Similarly, 1st Mariner bank has used twitter as social marketing tool to connect with its consumers (Thomases, 2010).

Social media works as a mediator among the bank and customers. Social media assists to provide right and survival information of the organization to the customers. It also provides valuable idea to customers for surviving the economy. Social media marketing also assists to create brand value of the organization. Customer feels trust at the organization due to quick & real information sharing. It is also beneficial to bank for quick problem solving and customer service.

Social media is the tool of spreading information about product and services of the bank at geographic level in a least time and at low cost. In the social media marketing, friends are available in the community of the customer. It works as a viral marketing to spread information from one person to other persons of the community (Jayawardhen, C & Foley, 2000). Rak Bank (UAE) is also a live example that is available at twitter. Ran Bank uses twitter to share real time information as discount benefits of Rak bank card and also available for customer service (Rak Bank Live, 2010). Social media marketing and online banking are not only beneficial to customers rather than it is also beneficial to the banks to coverage the larger market and provide better track to customers (Shao, 2007).

Summary

This question belongs to marketing. The question is about the emergence of social media marketing in banking sector. In the recent years, the world has been taken by social media. Now, social media marketing is emerging as a new phenomenon with almost equal prospects to that of regular or conventional marketing. A literature review of social media marketing in the banking sector has been given in the solution.

Total word count is 4589

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