Effectiveness of Social Media Marketing

Social media is not new. Facebook has been around since 2004, YouTube since 2005, and Twitter in 2006. What is new is how social media sites like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are affecting the way businesses market their products and services. Never before in our history have consumers been able to communicate so effortlessly with each other and with the businesses they frequent. Never before have businesses been able to interact and react to customer feedback so quickly and efficiently. However, just because businesses have the ability to use social media for their marketing and advertising efforts, does not necessarily mean they should. This paper intends to

The way that individuals and businesses communicate and interact has radically changed. With the development of technology and the internet, people can connect almost instantaneously and with very little effort. Social media has come to play a huge part in the way that the world communicates with each other. In fact, a recent report shows that in a single month people spend over 25 hours on social networks (“The Digital Consumer”). With consumers committing that much time to social media sites, social networking has become an important aspect of everyday life for individuals—and businesses. Like most marketing activities, social media marketing poses some risk. However, it is advantageous for businesses to exploit this opportunity, and develop an effective and ethical marketing strategy that includes using social media as a marketing tool.

Marketing is continuously changing and growing within the business field. Recently, social media is becoming one of the main marketing strategies used by companies, which is known as social media marketing. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and blogs are some of the platforms used in this area of marketing. These types of social media allow consumers to be updated by following their favorite companies. It is not a surprise companies are starting to regularly use this form of marketing due to the role social media has in today's society. Social media does, however, impact a company in a multitude of ways. There is much debate on whether companies should or should not use social media to market themselves. Even though there are some flaws

Social media has taken the marketing world by storm. Today, not only do companies have a dedicated Website,but organizations, representative of all industries and sizes, also have a blog, Twitter account, Facebook page and a Youtube channel (Wetpaint & Alimeter, 2009). In fact, social media is the number one activity on the web. Because of this, companies view social media as a critical component to its overall marketing strategy, especially since these tactics are cost-effective and produce results (Wetpaint & Alimeter Group, 2009).

Currently, the business world is rapidly changing due to technology advancement. Every company needs to catch up to the latest trends to be able to survive in the industry (Olsen, 2005). Turning into the digital age, online marketing like social media are now being used in most organizations. It is a good opportunity for companies to apply digital marketing to their marketing activities since it is much cheaper and affordable than the traditional marketing methods. Moreover, online media will enable marketing team to get customers’ feedback about their products and services in real time and improve what negatively affects their company (Irwin, 2011).

The effectiveness of Social Media can be improved depending on what metrics the marketing managers

The digital age has placed the power firmly in the consumer’s hands and also provided the means for those demands to be met. Modern day companies including car producers such as Ford create products based on the individual customer’s requirements. The colour, size, additional features and tyres can all be selected in advance, before the design is sent to the place of manufacture. Just in time production methods mean that this process can happen with immense speed and the customised product can be ready to drive within a matter of hours. This alteration in consumer buying patterns means that now instead of selling an individual product, advertisers are conveying a lifestyle and ideal for consumers to aspire to. The individualisation people feel through digital means that there is a far greater desire to convey a sense of self. After all, as the world gets bigger, it becomes harder to stand out from the crowd. Many brand’s strategies have fed from this insight in the past and through shared aspirations, values and style, create loyalty to the products, which become status symbols. Social media and blogs in particular, feed this ever increasing approach to advertising.

Social media is today widely integrated into dynamic computing and servicer architecture. In fact, social media can do so much more today than some years ago. With Twitter or Facebook it is possible to use networking and information sharing techniques to build high quality links and increase PR of a target site. In fact, social media marketing integration is so ingrained into the 21st century system it has become part of the entire cultural process in fact, as some authors state, it is part of the market creation process. Social media is a relatively new term that includes web and mobile based technologies that allow communication to be more of an interactive dialog between individuals, communities, and organizations. It is a way that technology is used to enhance communications and enable different sorts of cultures and groups to interact.

The 21st century has seen the emergence of Web 2.0 and with it the ever increasing use of Social media. Three of the world’s most popular brands online are social-media related (Facebook, Youtube, Wikipedia) and the world now spends an increasing amount of time on SNS and blog sites (Nielsen 2010). Therefore how companies use social media as an effective tool in their integrated communications mix is becoming of far greater importance to marketers.

Social media marketing is described by (Grant, 2010) “as a term that refers to using social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, You Tube, and Digg, as well as blogs, forums and other online communities to reach online consumers.” Social media marketing has given companies a profound opportunity in reaching

Advertising is evolving into a whole new format in the recent year with the explosion of technology advancement, in particular, social media. “The numbers are huge: an anticipated $72.09 billion spent on digital ads in the United States alone in 2016, a number expected to rise to more than $82 billion next year and more than $113 billion by 2020” (Newberry). Opposed to the traditional television commercials, radio, billboards, and paper media advertising, the use of social media advertising has increased substantially. Marketers are directing more of their advertising funds towards social media and evidence supports the positive effects of using social media to advertise. The utilization of social media advertising is effective in the sense that it is more cost-effective than the traditional advertising techniques, can target the intended audience, and is mobile in the ways it can be accessed.

Since the internet and social media have taken off in popularity, consumers are noticing that

Technology has allowed businesses to reach new markets and consumers; thus, allowing for a broader reach. The marketing efforts of the practice should be to attract new patients while keeping older patients satisfy with the services offered. The first thing the practice needs to do involves market segmentation, which allows the practice to reach their target segments and identify potential consumes that are being underserved by grouping them based on particular characteristics. For example, a practice might decide that individuals over a certain age are being underserved based on their market segmentation; therefore, marketing efforts should be aimed at those individuals. This is of particular importance

(Michaelidou, Siamagka & Christodoulides, 2011) A study has shown that majority of the users (93%) believes that most brands should have a social media presence while among them few believe that (83%) companies should always interact with consumers through social networking sites. Infact nowadays it is not something unusual to see business getting launched through Facebook / Twitter / Youtube channels and this effort is made by companies to save relevance among various competitors and reinforce bonds with customers (Mitic & Kapoulas, 2012). To add to this some papers have been analyzed in order to get a clear understanding of the importance of social media in day to day brands.

According to most experts, exploiting the digital platforms is the most effective and efficient way to reach the consumer. Technology has developed completely new markets, where the consumers currently exist, and has restructured the traditional ones (Ryan, 2014). Our society has shifted and so did the market. Brands’ existence on digital platforms then, guarantees a broader exposure in the market, and at the same time creates extended brand communications via direct interactivity with the targeted group of people (Young, 2010).