RENL: A Framework for Social Media Marketing Strategy

As practitioners and industries become more comfortable with the use of social media applications as a marketing tool, social media is becoming ubiquitous. However, social media must be managed just like the rest of media that organizations use to deploy their content and marketing strategy as part of their overall marketing strategy. Nevertheless, scholar research on social media marketing strategy is scant, and as a consequence current use of social media marketing is generally more intuitive than planned. This paper aims to create a comprehensive framework by identifying and classifying strategic actions for social media marketing, and mapping them to different social media marketing strategies. The framework has been developed from a synthesis of theories from social media marketing and general marketing strategy, and features two top-level categories of social media marketing strategic actions: content-specific and platformlevel strategic actions, each of them consisting of two subcategories: representation and engagement actions, and networking and listening actions, respectively. The proposed framework is expected to serve as a basis for further research on the effect of social media marketing strategies on consumer behavior, both from general and sector-specific perspectives.