Executive Summary
This is part one of a report that was prepared with reference to week eight of the activity that involved creating a social network. The activity was centered on the marketing of a clothing fashion brand through a group page created on Facebook. This report details the step-by-step procedure of creating the social network on Facebook, the experience of the group during the social networking process and the eventual outcome of the activity.
Creating a Social Network
We followed a systematic schedule in the creation of a social network for part one of the report. The activities of the group began in week 2 with the brainstorming of ideas for the search and choice of a brand that we wanted to promote through the use of a social media platform.
The group had only one member at this point. In week three, the activities of the group intensified as the group membership increased to three people. We narrowed down the ideas we generated during our brainstorming phase of the activity by choosing our preferred brand and a social networking platform. We specifically settled on Kalimah Brand as our preferred brand and Facebook as our preferred social networking website.
The Procedure and Outcome of the Social Networking Activity
Kalimah Brand is a prolific clothing line that is based in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The brand specializes in the manufacture and distribution of top notch fashion clothing that caters for the needs of customers across the market demographics. Our choice of Kalimah Brand was primarily informed by the company’s online presence.
The brand operates at the Kalimah e-store through which it distributes its vibrant fashion and clothing varieties. We reckoned that this would make it easier for us to integrate and synergize the online visibility of the Kalimah e-store with our interactions and our target customers on our Facebook page.
The choice of Facebook being our preferred social media platform, was influenced by the popularity and end-user friendly characteristics of Facebook in comparison to other social media platforms such as Twitter and Myspace. We sufficiently established that Facebook would guarantee easy integration between our target individual clothing items of the Kalimah Brand, the Kalimah e-store, and our group page.
Moreover, we recognized that the use of Facebook among the population is more widespread in Saudi Arabia compared to the other social media networks. As such, this provided the group with a great potential to reach out as many customers as possible while creating a huge fan base for our group’s discussion board and forum.
In week four, our activities had boiled down to the actual social media marketing on Facebook. We modified our group page and added a fan page to the main group page so as the solicit feedback from our followers. We created different demographic categories that mainly included “Women” and “Men” for our targeted marketing of products. We then proceeded to upload 15 pictures for the “Women” category.
Our membership increased to five people with the addition of a new group member “Mehdi” having been the hallmark activity of the week. The quality of our discussion forum similarly improved tremendously. Our fan page particularly contributed towards creating a feedback-oriented discussion forum for our group page.
Week five saw our membership increase to eight with the upload of 20 pictures for the “Men” category of our brand’s products having taken the center stage. Our activities went a notch higher in week six when we promoted ladies’ t-shirts for summer. Our Facebook group page became more active following the growth of our membership to 13 people.
We were particularly impressed by the response of customers on our Facebook page as many people began to inquire about the store manufacturer, the location of the store, and delivery methods for products. By week seven, our membership had doubled to 26 people and the number of inquiries about our brand’s products continued to increase.
Conclusion
The success of our group was largely motivated by the high quality standards of clothes from the Kalimah Brand. It was easy to sell these products because their photographs were evidently appealing encouraging prospective customers to seek for more information. The ease of feedback communication was the biggest advantage of social media networking that we experienced during this group activity.