Abstract:
There is an increasing use of social media on a global scale and it has been forcing organizations to restructure
and adjust their marketing activities. In a relationship-driven economy, the goal of achieving a sustainable
competitive advantage makes it crucial to adapt to the ever-changing trends in the market. Social media
contributes to this goal since it has a considerable impact on creating and shaping brand value for organizations.
The social networks help organizations enhance the development of strong brands not only through promoting
their products and services but also providing them the platform to build strong and reliable relationships with
their customers. This paper aims to investigate the role of social media on brands by examining the active role of
banks on social networks. For this purpose, the “tweets” of the five Turkish banks with the highest brand values
in the banking sector have been analyzed by content analysis method. The sample banks are drawn from the
Banker’s annual Top 500 Banking Brands 2014 report. Brand value is used as the selection criteria of the sample
banks and “Twitter” social network is considered as the primary social media outlet. The data is composed of the
“tweets” and gathered from the official Twitter accounts of the banks with the highest brand values in Turkey.
The “retweets” and the texts sent by other Twitter users are excluded. The findings indicate that the sample banks
are active users of social media. These banks do not only use Twitter but also other social networks as well as
their official websites. In addition, the paper displays specific purposes the banks have for using social media
sites.