Identifying and Ranking the Challenges and Opportunities of Social Media Marketing

Despite the increasing growth of investment in the field of social media marketing, identifying the challenges and opportunities of this new approach has been neglected in the marketing literature. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to identify and rank the opportunities and challenges of social media marketing. The research is done in two steps with a mixed method. In the first step, by a qualitative approach, the opportunities and challenges identified via experts and professionals in the field of social media marketing, and in the second step, in order to evaluate the findings of the qualitative section as well as ranking the opportunities and challenges, the quantitative approach and the questionnaire tool have been used. In the qualitative section, a stratified sampling method was used and in a quantitative part, a judgmental sampling method was used. In the qualitative step, data from 15 semi-structured interviews were analyzed by content analysis method. In the quantitative step, the data from 47 questionnaires were analyzed by Sign test and weighted average method. The results indicate that the most important opportunity for social media marketing is the accurate recognition of customer needs through social media, and the most important challenge is the distrust of the audience to the social media.