Introductory survey of foundational concepts and principles

Social Media Survey Breakdown

Social Media Marketing Survey Breakdown

The survey presented here discusses the innovation of evolving social networking platforms and how they can be useful within a professional context. Social media has recently taken the contemporary world by storm, with millions of users already online and new ones signing up each day. There are already a number of social media platforms, with the top names being Facebook, Twitter, and Linked in. These sites bring people all over the world together based on shared interests and common traits. This then creates an expansive new network that can be utilized for both personal and professional advancement. Social media works by connecting both friends and strangers with similar interests in order to expand individual social networks beyond what would have been possible in person. As such, the survey discusses how well these platforms can transition into powerful marketing tools for the next generation of wired businesses.

The main purpose of the survey is to help extrapolate the potential marketing and business benefits the latest trends in social media carry with them. Social networking can not only expand one's personal network, but also one's professional one as well. The idea of social networking through social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Linked in, or the many other sites available today can be capitalized by businesses of all types and industries in order to expand their consumer base.The survey focuses particularly on SMEs in order to show how the cost effective strategy of marketing via social media platforms can help extend their range and potential with very little initial investments. Social media can serve as a powerful and innovative new tool that takes word of mouth marketing to a new level of effectiveness for SMEs trying to compete with larger enterprise businesses.

In order to examine this constantly evolving and incredibly new field, the research methodology must be carefully planned in correlation with the main elements of social media itself. In order to best suit the survey's purpose, the research methodology will follow a qualitative format that is appropriate for studying social phenomenon as it is happening and being experienced in real time. This is thus a correlational research measure, which aims to show a correlation between increases in marketing potential with increased use of social networking platforms for SMEs of various industries. The research will use the coding methods of grounded theory in order to extrapolate meaning from open ended survey responses. External validity will be assured through the number of SMEs included in the survey to ensure that results represent a shared consensus.

The type of research you are doing (casual or correlational) -- address measures about external validity

Social networking has such potential for SME business strategies. With this in mind, it is the general hypothesis of the research that social networking would prove to benefit SME marketing strategies enormously. This cost effective measure will allow SMEs to strengthen their marketing techniques to such an extent that they will be able to compete with larger enterprise businesses.