SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING AND GHOST SHOPPING APPROACH; A NEW BUSINESS TOOL

Research motivation: The researcher is a mystery shopper who has vast experience in various field analyses. The researcher has taken up a few good assignments in various domains, which has given him a good experience. Thus, this experience has motivated the researcher to explore how mystery shopping is used in social media and how the process works in reality. The connectivity between mystery shopping and social media is a new emerging topic and only a very few research work is seen and hence this gap has been used to proceed with this research title. Research materials and methods: The research work makes use of quantitative and qualitative techniques to draw and analyse the data. The respondents for this research work is mystery shoppers, market research agencies, experts in marketing research and mystery shopping, a few marketers who deal with digital marketing etc. The tool used for this research is factor analysis for quantitative analysis and various qualitative techniques to determine the experience, observations, past case studies and literature works. Research outcome: From the quantitative techniques, it is clear that customer experience and relationship between the sales representatives and the customers dealing through online marketing plays an important role in the success of social media marketing which the mystery shoppers observe. Based on the observations a detailed report is submitted which will enhance the firms to form strong strategies. Future scope: The future researchers can analyse on the related aspects of mystery shopping and social media. The problems faced by mystery shoppers with regard to social media observations, the skills needed to deal with digital tools can be researched.