Knowledge Sharing Practices Among Social Media Marketers and the Significance for Business Sustainability

Introduction

Social media usage is becoming increasingly popular among the Nigerian populace. This has been supported by actual data from several empirical investigations (examples: Asibong et al., 2020; Sulaiman et al., 2020). This could shed light on the causes of the rise in social media campaigns, marketing, and advertising (ads) among Nigerians. These social media marketers are popularly referred to as “influencers” (Harrigan et al., 2021; Zhang et al., 2017). These “influencers” are employed on a contractual basis by various people, organizations, and groups to influence public opinion about a specific issue or phenomenon. Their actions are more noticeable in the Nigerian Twitter space, where they frequently operate in cliques. This factional idea of engagement is to propagate or make the tweets of those in a group more visible via like retweet, and comment. That, however, does not mean there are no such practices on other social media spaces, most especially on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

The recruitment of social media influencer in Nigeria’s social media spaces is quite informal and subtle. Their sponsored posts are not tagged, and thus “consumers” are convinced by these posts unknowingly that they are sponsored. Aside from this model on Nigeria’s social media space, the idea of social media marketing has been formalized. Different organizations have been established that carry out different social media campaigns for their clients. These organizations are more structured in engagements and practices. Some examples of these organizations are Wild Fusion, Mcjeh Digital, Realestateko Agency, Big Field Digital, Marketing Trybe, Rushing Tap, Simtech Creative, Brand Envoy Africa, Tech 0’clock, and so on. As much as these organizations operate separately, it has been observed that they share ideas. It has been observed that the emergence of these agencies is not unlikely, as the intrusion of digital marketing has had a devastating effect on the engagement of traditional marketing firms, which has indeed led some traditional agencies to adopt the blended approach, spelling a paradigm shift in the industry.

It has been observed that there is a practice of sharing ideas on how to enhance campaigns and ads. This chapter focuses on how these social media marketers share knowledge and its significance for business sustainability. The wide stakeholder portfolios of contemporary companies, which frequently have competing interests, place a high priority on concerns about business sustainability (Gupta et al., 2014). Social media marketers may be oblivious to the business sustainability concerns of an organization that gave them a marketing gig, which may lead to competing interests during the discharge of their duties and responsibilities. Consequently, social marketers’ practices may cast an undue influence on the business sustainability strategies of the employing company.

Sharma et al. (2010) established that identification and marketing to the environmentally conscious consumer have received a lot of attention, despite the long-running arguments on ecological conservation and environmental practices in marketing. Less focus has been placed on marketing's function in an eco-friendly supply chain and how it interacts with eco-friendly products and operations. Here, eco-friendliness concerns practices that are not harmful to the larger environment. While Saura et al. (2020) have established that digital marketers consider and adopt sustainable strategies to carry out their online campaigns, little has been discussed on how these sustainable strategies or models have been shared among the different social media marketers. Thus, this chapter seeks to unpack these concerns from the perspectives of the knowledge-sharing practice of social media marketers.