| dc.description.abstract | The aim of this thesis is to contribute new insights on social media usage in organisations by answering the following main research question: How is social media used to support organisational activities in marketing and finance departments?
The use of social media has had exponential growth the last decade which has greatly impacted personal and organisational life. Due to the fast-paced development of mobile technology, there is a need for continuous research on the concept of social media. Scholars and practitioners have widely studied the implications of social media for individuals, but there is a lack of scholarly research on social media in an organisational context. In this thesis we explore how social media usage in organisations has developed over time, and how organisations use social media to solve problems in order to support organisational activities in marketing and finance departments. By conducting a case study on two Norwegian organisations, Delta and Sigma, both of which have used social media the last ten years, we were able to study how organisations use social media to support the organisational activities in these departments. We collected data through semi-structured interviews of eleven employees across the two organisations, and conducted a comparative analysis through the theoretical lens of Benford & Snow’s (2000) framing theory.
We found that social media is used to support four key organisational activities in the following ways. First, in regard to marketing activities, social media is used to meet competition and to reach target customers. Facebook is extensively used to support these activities, due to the ease in which a broad audience can be reached, as well as costeffectiveness. Second, organisations use social media for branding purposes. We found that Facebook and Instagram are the most used applications to support branding activities. Third, social media supports customer service activities since it offers contact points where customers can provide feedback and ask questions. In this regard, Facebook is the predominantly used social media application. Forth, we found that social media is used to support recruitment activities, where LinkedIn is used to post job advertisements and relevant news about the organisation or industry in which the organisation operates. Moreover, we found that the marketing departments have the overall responsibility for all these supported activities. However, we did not find substantial evidence of social media supporting organisational activities in the finance departments. | nb_NO |
