For almost every brand in the 21st Century, social media marketing is an essential part of reaching current and potential customers and clients. The challenges of using media where communications flow from many to many is one that all contemporary brands must consider, whether they actively engage with social media or not.
A social media strategy is a plan that outlines your social media goals, the tactics you could use to achieve them, and metrics that could be tracked to measure performance.
Your strategy should pay particular attention to the sustainable nature of your product/service and how this will be promoted through your social media presence. You should identify the target audience for your brand for each platform, and the plan for what when and where you will share content. You should also consider the key competitors and how you will ensure your brand will out-perform theirs.
Demonstrating an understanding of how social media marketing can help brands connect to, and expand, their audiences.
Developing a meaningful and appropriate plan which describes the needs and requirements of the brand.
Analysing how the brand is expected to benefit from the implementation of the plan.
Anticipating and assessing the impact of the plan using meaningful indicators/metrics.
The following is an indicative grading guide:
Band A (19-23): Excellence in critical reflection of marketing strategies including an extensive reading out with core texts assisting in the formulation of a critical social media strategy.
Band B (16-18): Very good use of additional reading that supports a critical reflection and very good referencing throughout towards a very good social media strategy.
Band C (13-15): Good use of additional reading supporting some critical reflection accompanied by adequate referencing for a good social media strategy
Band D (10-12): Sufficient reading and use of core material with minimal additional reading and some referencing defects in the construction of an acceptable social media strategy.
Band F (bellow 10): Inadequate reading, lack of criticality, major structural and referencing defects for an incomplete social media strategy.
Sample Solution
Sample Solution
This paper presents an example of how economists can take the behavioural models of the social sciences (namely cognitive dissonance) and incorporate them into their own assumptions of behaviour (that agents are rational actors).
There are three basic premises of economic cognitive dissonance: confirmation biases, personal belief distortion and the persistence of chosen beliefs (despite their veracity). To confirm these premises, the authors illustrate a number of examples in the workplace which highlight the inherent flaws which are present in day-to-day cognition. For example, workers will believe in the safety of their workplace despite present dangers, to ease anxiety and caution; running the risk of injury should their judgements fail. In this example, the authors still maintain that the workers are rational; but only to the extent that their belief structure is the result of a subconscious cost-benefit analysis.
Social psychology, which is based upon the theory of cognitive consistency, offers psychological evidence of cognitive dissonance. Agents self-identify themselves as ‘smart’ and ‘nice’, and any information that conflicts with this identification is ignored, rejected or supplemented for another belief that fits within this self-identity. Agents rarely recognise these errors, as recognition itself would again be in conflict with the agent’s ego. Bayesian decision theory is offered as a critique of this theory, however the authors look to the results of psychological experiments analysing cognitive dissonance to discount this critique; arguing that the evidence supports the notion that it is in fact personal beliefs that affect decisions, more than available information.
With these findings in mind, the authors have constructed a decision model which modifies the traditional model of rational decision making and demonstrates the resultant opportunities and consequences. This paper approached the economics of ‘irrational behaviour’ from a different perspective as that of Gary Becker, who holds that irrational behaviour is a random and spontaneous deviation from economic rationality.
This article, when positioned amongst broader literature, establishes a clear model and provides practical outcomes. The model is robust and well thought out, allowing for an easy understanding of the relevant concepts. However, where this article falls short, is the confidence with which they present this model. In my personal opinion, matters of economic rationality are far too com
