Branding in the age of social media: how entrepreneurs use social networks to boost their service-based businesses

Abstract The basics of product and service branding are generally the same. However, creating a brand for a company that offers services requires more effort because the services are hard to visualize and each client has different expectations. More than promoting any of the services, branding aims to create a perception of trust so that the brand name to be associated with integrity, quality, and innovation. The purpose of this paper is to determine how entrepreneurs develop their service-based business through social networks branding and also what are the benefits obtained from each method. The authors have researched previously what is the impact of social network marketing on business development and noticed that service-based businesses tend to obtain benefits from different activities comparing to product-based businesses. The authors researched through a semistructured questionnaire the online activities of 71 SMEs from Bucharest that offer various types of services to their customers. The results obtained are then correlated with the online and offline performance of the company.