Social Media Usage in Business-to-Business Sales: Conceptualization, Antecedents, and Outcomes

摘要

In recent years, the rise of social media has attracted much attention in marketing research. Social Media enable open and broad communication and cooperation. Thus, social media applications provide marketing executives with a raft of new options - targeting the impact of direct user interaction, say, or the online integration of users in corporate value creation processes. However, extant research offers only scant insight into the use of social media in B2B sales relationships. Therefore, we need to achieve a better strategic understanding of how to use social media in sales processes. Resultant strategies need to be conceptualized and evaluated with respect to their effect on important B2B sales objectives like customer satisfaction, loyalty, and sales performance. Responding to these gaps in current social media marketing research, this paper addresses the following four questions: 1) How should social media usage in B2B sales relationships be conceptualized on multiple levels? 2) Which B2B social media strategies are important in enhancing customer satisfaction? 3) Which antecedents drive the usage of social media on multiple levels? 4) How effective is social media usage in B2B sales relationships for different types of customers?