Social Media Marketing Impact on Brand Loyalty

Brand loyalty has become one of the main concerns of the marketers these days. Brand loyalty is important as it improves sales revenue, increase market share, maintain existing customers and most importantly, generates more profit for the organization. Marketers have, in the past tried a lot of things i.e. Sponsorships, improved brand elements and one-to-one marketing strategies etc. Internet marketing and social media marketing has emerged as the latest and very viable technique for improving brand loyalty. This research is based in Turkey as it ranked 12th among the Countries with most internet usage. 41.6% of its population that is approx. 30 million people has access to internet.

Social media marketing has given companies better ground to communicate with their current and potential customers, allowing them to capture the heart and mind of the people and create better brand loyalty. One of the aims of this paper is to shed light on the perspective of the customers regarding the impact social media had on them to change/improve the idea of brand loyalty they had. Social media marketing is different from the conventicle marketing thus marketers have to follow different strategies and connect better with the people instead of just pushing the sales. With the bulk information now available on the internet these days, by the help of Google, customers can easily filter out the information they do not need and only focus of the content which interests them. The study showed that brand loyalty of the customers are positively affected when the brand offers advantageous campaigns, relevant contents, frequently updates its contents, offers contents that are popular among the friends, appears on various platforms and offers applications on social media.

Data was collected by a survey of 338 people who average aged 26 years, of which 60% were either graduates or undergraduates. The questionnaire was carefully designed, to only focus on the people who use social media and follow at least one brand, share its contents and do it once a week or more. The questionnaire was developed, so on analysis, could generate acceptable conclusion on the impact of social media on developing brand loyalty. Most of the data was collected from the websites who share music, videos, pictures and other entertainment stuff.

The paper shows in detail the data acquired from the survey, helping to form a solid picture of the social media impact on creating brand loyalty amongst the customers who are a part of the internet or other social media.

The social media marketing can be now termed as an improving and growing platform for the marketers to promote their brand and further improve the loyalty of the customers. The research shows that the relevancy of the content, its popularity amongst the people and other social media campaigns can be very advantageous for the companies. Customers now want to engage themselves in different activities i.e. Brand promotion,