Implementation & the usage of social media communication as a public relations strategy by brands

Development of technology and internet has caused digital media to replace traditional broadcasting ways at the public eye. Brands have increased their tendencies towards social media and have started to spend a significant portion of their advertising budgets in this area. An important reason for the transfer of resources to this area is the fact that advertising models provide direct access to the target audience with the help of listening tools while brands can access the comments about their product or brand and can take necessary actions as they wish. Youtube, founded in 2005 and became one of the most used social sharing sites, is offering important opportunities for brands. Brands both can share contents in this field and get help from people who shared content on their field who are called influencers. Factors like, theese people to be knowledgeable in their field, shared content about the subject before, did not work with competitor firms, followed by a serious amount of mass are important to selection theese people. It is not known generally that the brands made cooperations like this, their products gets to seen by millions of people, gets used by influencers and reccomended by them are affecting the buying behaviour negatively or positively. In this study, it has been investigated whether Influencer collaborations of brands have an effect on purchasing behavior and findings have been put forward within this framework. The findings of the study were obtained by conducting an online questionnaire. The survey was conducted with the participation of 403 people in total. Data Independent sample test was used to compare two independent groups of continuous variables, and one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to compare continuous variables with more than two groups. Statistical significance was evaluated at p<0.05.