ASSESSMENT OF TWITTER BAN ON BRAND AWARENESS IN NIGERIA (A CASE STUDY OF RITE FOOD LIMITED, LAGOS STATE )
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
Twitter is a social media site that allows users to follow one another and send 140-character messages. Unlike other social networking sites, relationships on Twitter could be completely one-sided. One user can follow another without forcing the second to do the same, for instance. Twitter made a big splash when it launched in March 2006 thanks to its straightforward user interface. This set it apart from its competitors, who at the time allowed users to completely customize their personal pages, creating a cluttered, garish appearance (Experian, 2009).
With its flexible application programming interface (API) and unmatched celebrity appeal, Twitter has long encouraged third-party developers (Twitter Counter, 2010). But after their respective first three years, Twitter’s growth has lagged behind that of Google and Facebook, despite its enormous popularity and considerable mainstream media coverage. There are 18 million users of Google, 27 million on Facebook, and 8 million on Twitter (Battelle, 2009). Twitter is no longer the new kid on the block as it approaches its fifth year of operation, but many people are still unsure of its goal or whether it will be useful to them. It’s “for finding and sharing what’s happening in your life right now,” according to Twitter. Although this is true and regretfully, most of the content uploaded is “pointless chatter,” it ignores Twitter’s potential for generating revenue (Java et al., 2007).
Year after year, the internet advertising industry expands, and with technological advancements, there are now more methods than ever to advertise goods and businesses. The ‘people,’ on the other hand, now demand power, and they have the ‘acute editing abilities’ to listen to whatever messages they want to hear. With consumers’ ability to block media messages from being displayed to them, marketers must find a means to contact their customers without them realizing it is a kind of advertising. Curran, O’Hara, and O’Brien (2011) define media buying as “the practice of contacting the owner of a website and acquiring advertising space, typically in the form of a banner placement, on their website.” Media purchasing placements are available on popular websites like YouTube and Facebook. Businesses depend on the data given by these websites to predict the percentage of their target audience that they will reach. But after their respective first three years, Twitter’s growth has lagged behind that of Google and Facebook, despite its enormous popularity and considerable mainstream media coverage. There are 18 million users of Google, 27 million on Facebook, and 8 million on Twitter (Battelle, 2009). Twitter is no longer the new kid on the block as it approaches its fifth year of operation, but many people are still unsure of its goal or whether it will be useful to them. It’s “for finding and sharing what’s happening in your life right now,” according to Twitter. Although this is true and regretfully, most of the content uploaded is “pointless chatter,” it ignores Twitter’s potential for generating revenue (Java et al., 2007).
When a business purchases a position on a popular website, it may be able to reach the majority of its target market, but it will also be spending a lot of money on visitors who are unlikely to be interested in what the business has to offer. Nowadays, social networking websites like Facebook account for one out of every five online advertisements that people see (Curran, O’Hara, & O’Brien, 2011).
Every social networking site has different features that can be used to promote a business. Users can post links, movies, images, fan pages, organizations, and even adverts on certain social networking sites. Similar to how people can create generic pages, businesses can as well. After the website is live, “friends” can be added with the intention of obtaining additional followers via ‘word of mouth’ marketing.
Once the original group of friends has been exhausted, events may be planned and more friends invited. However, unlike YouTube and Facebook, Twitter has tremendous potential to foster a vibrant and inventive ecosystem of users, businesses, and media sources, allowing people to participate in conversation on subjects that are relevant and important to them. In its early days, Twitter used the slogan “What are you doing?” which fit their model (Curran, O’Hara, & O’Brien, 2011).
They wanted people to talk about what was going on in their lives in real time. As the program increased in popularity, it started to develop naturally. Users started to exchange information in real time on a worldwide scale, companies were engaged and promoted brand conversation, and news started to break through the platform faster and more effectively than conventional mainstream media services. As a result, Twitter’s slogan has been changed to “The greatest way to discover what’s new in your world,” which is more appropriate and relevant to the service it provides. The question of how this potential might be realized and put into action, however, still exists. Several people are worried about Twitter’s inability to generate a profit, which may have influenced some businesses’ decisions to invest time and resources on the platform. Businesses had questions about Twitter’s relevance and usefulness to them because there was no clear strategic path to follow due to the lack of a sustainable business model (Stutzbach et al., 2006).
1.2 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
Rite Foods Ltd is one company that is eager to use Twitter as a delivery system for advertising because it can provide excellent reach, frequency, and target demographics at a low cost. Twitter can be used to advertise new products, sales/offers, events, and stay in touch with existing customers. This can lead to high-quality, company-specific PR. It goes without saying that they would want to advertise their goods to a market that is growing at such a healthy rate.
Rite Foods Ltd won’t, however, be able to access the enormous target due to President Muhammadu Buhari’s Twitter ban
Twitter, which can make it harder for consumers to become aware of their expanding brand in Nigeria.
This study aims to evaluate how the Twitter ban has affected Rite Foods Limited’s, Lagos state, brand recognition.
1.3 OBJECTIVE OF THE STUDY
The following are the objectives of this study;
1. To determine the extent to which the Twitter ban affected the brand awareness of Rite Foods Limited.
2. To ascertain the effects of the Twitter ban on the sales of products of Rite Foods Limited.
3. To investigate the means through which Rite Foods Limited continued to create brand awareness after the ban.
1.4 RESEARCH QUESTIONS
The following queries serve as the study’s compass;
1. To what extent did Rite Foods Limited’s brand awareness suffer as a result of the Twitter ban?
2. How has the Twitter ban affected Rite Foods Limited’s product sales?
3. What strategies has Rite Foods Ltd continued to use to build brand awareness?
1.5 SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY
This study will be important because it will highlight the risks that the Twitter ban poses to various emerging brands and the requirement that businesses always have access to these channels for interacting with their main target audiences. This study will contribute to the academic community by offering resources that other scholars can use as a guide when working on a related topic.
1.6 SCOPE OF THE STUDY
This study will only cover Twitter and not other forms of social media. It will look at the effects of the Twitter ban on brand awareness of Rite Foods Limited, Lagos, Nigeria.
1.7 LIMITATION OF THE STUDY
The only limitation faced by the researcher during the course of carrying out this study was lack of funds.
1.8 DEFINITION OF TERMS
1. BRAND AWARENESS: Brand awareness is the extent to which customers are able to recall or recognize a brand under different conditions.
2. BAN: A ban is an official or legal prohibition of a particular thing or action. In this study, a ban refers to the official prohibition of Twitter.
3. TWITTER: A social media platform for the purpose of communicating to a recipient or target audience.
REFERENCES
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O’Hara, K., O’Brien, S., and Curran, K. (2011). The Function of Twitter in the Corporate World. 10.4018/jbdcn.2011070101. IJBDCN. 7. 1–15.
Experian. (2009). (2009). top search engines and websites. the data center was retrieved from http://www.hitwise.com/ukresources
Finin, T., Java, A., Song, X., & Tseng, B. (2007).
Understanding the communities and use of microblogging is the reason we use Twitter. San Jose, California.
Sen, S., Duffield, N., Stutzbach, D., Rejaie, R., and Willinger, W. (2006, October 25-27). For unstructured peer-to-peer networks, on unbiased sampling. Brazil’s River de Janeriro.
Counter for Twitter (2010). the top 1000 users on Twitter. from Twitter Counter, pages 100, retrieved
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