Contemporary Issues in Social Media Marketing is ideal for marketing professionals, researchers, and academics using social media marketing to understand the customer journey, CRM, strategy, goals, and objectives.
View the current edition of the book: Contemporary Issues in Social Media Marketing
https://www.routledge.com/Contemporary-Issues-in-Social-Media-Marketing/Rishi-Bandyopadhyay/p/book/9781138679184
Challenge
While researching social media marketing, the editors—Bikramjit Rishi and Subir Bandyopadhyay—found a number of books by practitioners. However, they did not find a single book that compiled the extant academic research on social media marketing. This type of academic research is disseminated through a number of academic journals in the marketing field such as Journal of Marketing, Journal of Interactive Marketing and Journal of Digital and Social Media Marketing. As a result, prior to the book’s publication in 2018, there was a lack of academic text books on social media marketing that disseminated the theories and empirical research findings. The expectation was that the first-edition of the book would fill a critical void in the academic literature of social media marketing.
Approach
Social media has numerous applications in business, especially in the B2C (business to consumer) environment. In the B2B (business to business) environment, the application of social media, in 2018, was comparatively limited. This is because the perception, at the time, was that social media sites could not support B2B marketing goals and objectives.
In the chapter co-authored by Dr. Roisin Vize and Monique Sherrett, “Social Media Marketing for B2B: from information to decision to retention,” we proposed a conceptional model of how social media could be effectively implemented in a B2B context and offered frameworks for performance measurement.
As a marketing practitioner, Monique’s contribution focused on the frameworks, practical recommendations, and best-practice case examples that highlighted strategies a marketer could consider as they design, plan, and integrate social media content for the modern, socially connected B2B buyer.
Results
In line with book’s mandate, the Social Media for B2B chapter explored the benefits and challenges of social media marketing from a B2B perspective and synthesized theoretical and practitioner frameworks for social media strategy, tactical implementation and performance measurement.
The second edition of the book was published in 2025. The updated text covers developments in user-generated content, AI, virtual influencers, and leveraging social media for CRM.
In a short time span, social media has transformed communication, as well as the way consumers buy, live and utilize products and services. Understanding the perspectives of both consumers and marketers can help organizations to design, develop and implement better social media marketing strategies. However, academic research on social media marketing has not kept pace with the practical applications and this has led to a critical void in social media literature. This new text expertly bridges that void.
