Introduction Social media marketing is finding its way to become a recent component of integrated communications mix. The appearance of social media platforms offers organisations an inexpensive way to create and implement marketing campaigns. 1 Exponential growth and importance of social media platforms, from blogs, Facebook and Twitter to LinkedIn and YouTube, offers organizations the chance to communicate with millions of customers around the globe every day.2 To highlight the importance of social media for companies it is an interesting fact that Twitter reached a benchmark of 58 million Tweets per day this year3 and Facebook records over 1.19 billion active users in September 2013.4 The Users are spending average time of 6.8 hours per week on the networks page. This is not just a phenomenon among the young generation: according to Adults’ media use and attitudes Report 2013 over the half (53%) of adults post at least once a week to social networking sites.5 Therefore, it is important to understand the relationship between digital communications and traditional communication in the old media and the integration of
Introduction Social media marketing is finding its way to become a recent component of integrated communications mix. The appearance of social media platforms offers organisations an inexpensive way to create and implement marketing campaigns. 1 Exponential growth and importance of social media platforms, from blogs, Facebook and Twitter to LinkedIn and YouTube, offers organizations the chance to communicate with millions of customers around the globe every day.2 To highlight the importance of social media for companies it is an interesting fact that Twitter reached a benchmark of 58 million Tweets per day this year3 and Facebook records over 1.19 billion active users in September 2013.4 The Users are spending average time of 6.8 hours per week on the networks page. This is not just a phenomenon among the young generation: according to Adults’ media use and attitudes Report 2013 over the half (53%) of adults post at least once a week to social networking sites.5 Therefore, it is important to understand the relationship between digital communications and traditional communication in the old media and the integration of