Social media has been widely used by businesses nowadays. Although in B2B industry, social media marketing isn’t grown up as fast as it was in B2C market, many businesses begun to develop social media strategies and reach to new and existing corporate customers via social media recently. The aim of the study is enhancing our understanding on social media usage of maritime transportation companies which are one of the biggest players of B2B service industry. In B2C market social media and its benefits for businesses has taken too much attention by far, however role of social media in B2B market is quite new and fruitful research area. Recent researches put attention to investigate the social media usage in maritime industry newly. However, this research will be the first for identifying Turkish maritime transportation companies’ Facebook usage by adopting stakeholder engagement index which will be a contribution for Turkish maritime transportation practitioners to improve their social media pages.
An exploratory research was conducted to understand the social media usage patterns of Turkish maritime transportation companies through content analysis technique. Stakeholders engagement matrix which was developed by Bonson and Ratkai (2013) was used to measure popularity, commitment and virality of maritime transportation companies’ Facebook accounts. According to the results of the analyses this study confirms that Turkish maritime industry is not active on social media yet. Posts shared by companies are related to corporate image in a large extent. These posts consist of previous experiences, works on progress, in-firm promotions, advertisements or news about the company or employees, success stories and social responsibility projects. Posts on special days and celebrations follow the first category in a considerable extent. These findings shows similarity with the findings of Çalışkan and Esmer .They found that the main difference between Turkish and World port samples is the given importance on the celebration of special days (e.g., the celebration of festivals, special days such as Victory Day and Republic Day). Secondly, posts with highest engagement average are the posts under the category of “corporate image” are on work processes, new equipments, ships or new ports and new routes, staff and their success or promotion. It seems that if the posts are tagged with specific names they are most likely shared by staff. Finally, however for logistic companies average stakeholder engagement index was found 52 by Sürücü and Sakar in 2017, in the present study this index is found 18 for maritime transportation companies. It shows that maritime industry has a very small share in logistic sector in terms of social media usage efficiency.