Abstract:

Thanks to social media sites, brands can increase their awareness, let their followers know about their products and services, announce different types of campaigns for various purposes and pitch their corporate messages. As more people join social media sites and use them regularly, social me­dia landscape is bound to get bigger in the future. Social media has grown as a competitor to traditi­onal media and has been an important component of integrated marketing communications. Consu­mers participate in social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, and share their experiences with brands’ products and services on these platforms. Brands can also create online profiles, get featured on social media by introducing these profiles on brand websites, and try to use relational messages to optimize their relationship with their prospective and current customers. The flexible structure of social media allows rapid dissemination of messages. Therefore, social media pro­vide great opportunities to brand managers who want to have a positive effect with positive mouth-to-mouth (WOM) communication. In addition to this, Twitter enables brands to communicate with their existing and potential customers by using an electronic WOM (e-WOM) tool. E-WOM is a new chan­nel for consumers to express their thoughts and it is more effective than traditional WOM due to its access to wider audiences. Most of the text-based information provided to e-WOM are available on the Internet is archived and can thus be used for an indefinite period. Therefore, e-WOM is much more reliable than other sources on the Internet since it is written and archived. Millions of users share their thoughts on different topics related to everyday life through micro-blogging. Micro-blogging is one of the newest forms of social media and is often associated with Twitter. The use of Twitter by brands also revealed the use of Twitter as an internal communication and online listening tool. Furthermore, Twitter might be accepted as a tool to generate e-WOM and go viral. By increasing consumer enga­gement in brand communications and encouraging e-WOM behaviors, brands can make more per­sonalized and targeted marketing communications. Information about the brand’s products, services, and associated links are among the most frequently used content types by the brands on Twitter. The purpose of this paper is to analyze social media usage styles of brands and their brand communica­tions behavior on Twitter. There are several reasons why Twitter was used in this study instead of ot­her social media sites such as Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. First, Twitter enables users to con­nect and maintain others based on their common interests and activities. Second, Twitter users range from regular users to celebrities, from company representatives to politicians and even to presidents. Therefore, it is possible to get ideas from different interest groups easily in the form of text messages. Renault, Hyundai, and Fiat were among the best-selling car brands in Turkey according to the Janu­ary-March 2017 Retail Automotive Sales report of Automotive Distributors Association Turkey. This is why those brands’ Twitter accounts were chosen. The specified automobile brands’ tweets posted between December 1, 2016, and February 28, 2017 were analyzed with content analysis and they were coded to reflect both interpersonal and machine interaction. First, tweets were classified to reflect in­terpersonal interaction. Tweets indicated as highly interactive if they contain tags, as medium intera­ctive if they contain retweets or referrals, and as low interactive if they contain a response to some­one else. Tweets containing only one level of interactivity were classified as fully interactive. In order to indicate machine interaction, tweets were coded separately, allowing users to choose to access ad­ditional material such as hyperlinks. Afterward, the tweets of all three brands were categorized manu­ally according to the literature. These categories were examined under six major titles: conversational, pass along, news, status, phatic, and spam. Furthermore, it was found that these mentioned automo­bile brands’ tweets showed differences in categories such as conversational, pass along, news, status, phatic, and spam in terms of content. It was also determined that starting social media communicati­ons before the competitors did not always provide an efficient brand communications strategy. Brands should use separate Twitter accounts for different purposes. Many brands use different Twitter ac­counts for handling customer complaints and show these different account addresses in their profiles. However, in this current study, we saw that all three automobile brands had single Twitter accounts for many different purposes. Last but not least, we found that these top seller automobile brands lost the opportunity to reach their followers by communicating with auto industry influencers

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