Measuring social media marketing: moving towards a relationship-marketing approach

Because social media encourage two-way communication and interaction, they are valuable relationship-building tools for the marketer who chooses to use them to build dialogue and engage customers. In sport, these tools are ideal ways to improve customer relationships because consumers already have a desire to connect with products. However, measurement of the effectiveness of social media as marketing tools remains limited. From a relationship-marketing standpoint, social media should be evaluated based on their ability to improve relationship quality, which leads to a host of positive business outcomes. To do this, sport marketers must measure the impacts of social media engagement on customer relationships. The purpose of this conceptual paper was to explicitly connect social media marketing to relationship marketing and use relationship marketing as a framework for understanding measurement of marketing on social media.