The New (Marketing) Role of Firms as Media Content Providers – The case of SME’s Strategic Social Media Presence

摘要

In the new social media context, it is gradually more common to say that each party can itself be considereduda media content provider, firms included (through their brand pages). This tendency is reflected in audrising professional field called “content marketing”. This study incorporates the perspective of small andudmedium-sized enterprises (SMEs) into the scope of social media (SM) as a marketing communications andudmedia content distribution system. In an exploratory content analysis of 20 official SM brand pages withud1281 analyzed posts the authors study how SMEs respond to the advent of a new paradigm of marketingudcommunications with special attention to their usage of media-specific contents. SM impels companiesudto eventually rethink the traditional one-way communication flow of their marketing messages andudto incorporate a new, two-way communication into their marketing strategy, where (their engaged andudinvolved) users can create, modify, share and discuss content related to the firm’s activity. This study’sudpreliminary results show that diffusing content generally acts for SMEs as a facilitator to involve fans byudoffering a thematized space for them to manifest themselves in company-related topics. Therefore, contentudadds to the firms’ possibilities of brand positioning by offering a reflection of fans’ company- and contentrelatedudbehavior, which is a supplementary source of information.