The relationship between social media performance and brand image: A research on Turkish Airlines

At present, the brands have to make a remarkable difference in order to distinguish themselves from their competitors. The brands aim to take an active role in areas where they have consumers while they are designating their communication activities. Accordingly, having a new and dynamic structure among communication technologies, social media is designated as the first choice. Serving as a cost-free or low-cost meeting point that is also fast and direct, social media is becoming increasingly more popular among the brands. The activities the brands have conducted on social media enable consumers to get information about the brand and to communicate actively with the brand. Therefore, social media has become a significant environment in order for the brands to announce their goods and services as well as to communicate with the consumers. It has been deemed necessary to conduct research in order to identify whether there is a positive relationship with the social media performance of the brand and the brand image. In this paper, it has been aimed to identify whether there is a meaningful relationship between the perceived social media performance of Turkish Airlines brand and its brand image. In the first part of the paper, the concept of social media has been explained along with the subheadings such as its definition, characteristics and dimensions utilizing various literature sources. In the second part of the paper, the concept of brand has been addressed. Subheadings such as definition, benefits, identity, personality, equivalence, awareness and value of brand have been explained and finally the definition of brand image and its importance have been discussed. In the third part, research regarding the relationship between perceived social media performance and the brand image has been conducted. In the research, a survey with 396 participants has been completed at Adnan Menderes International Airport. In the first part of the survey, there are multiple choice questions regarding the demographic features of the participants such as their sex, age range, education level and income level as well as their social media use. In the second part of the survey, in order to measure the collected data, 5 point Likert scale Perceived Social Media Performance and Brand Image scales have been utilized. The collected data have been evaluated in the SPSS Package Programme and depending on the established hypotheses,the data have been interpreted via Reliability Analysis, Correlation Analysis, T Test and ANOVA test .As a result of the analyses, it has been found that there is a meaningful relationship between the perceived social media performance and the brand image. In addition, perceived social media performance and the brand image vary based on the sex and age groups while it does not indicate a significant difference based on education level and income level.