Social Media And Its Effect On Society

The use of social media marketing has become a standard way in which organizations advertise their products or services. Social media marketing allows consumers to have immediate access to other consumers reviews or to post a review about a product or service. There is engagement between the company and the consumer (Evans, Dave 2010). Social Media emerged in the late 1980’s when websites such as Prodigy, Compuserve and America Online. Prodigy was first of it’s kind and was known as a ”consumer online service”. Half of the page is devoted to advertising. Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Hi5, Bebo and Orkut are all social media platforms that are utilized as platforms today.

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.

In this current environment, social media advertising is no longer just a buzzword. It has become one of the ‘next big thing’ in today’s marketing strategy. In the past, it is a challenge to reach out to a wide audience in the shortest

Social media has taken off like a rocket throughout the years. The annoying sound of a modem connecting has turned into a soundless transaction. The wait time to connect is instant, opening a global world of interactions for people. You can now connect with anyone, anywhere at anytime at least once a day. Social media defined by Goyal is “Any platform,which provides the facility of sharing ideas, exchanging information and sending messages over an electronic medium, is considered as social media.” (Goyal,222). This is to include online magazines, Facebook, Twitter, Newspapers,Email, Blogs, YouTube and many more. Advertisers have taken notice to these platforms, utilizing social media to promote their brands, develop trust with the consumer,save money and target audiences faster than ever before.

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.

The invention of the internet could be considered the most notable technological advancement in the Twenty-First century as evidenced by its widespread availability and excessive use by people all over the world. As people of all ages and demographics spend increasingly more of their time on the Internet, daily social media use is simultaneously increasing for these users. Currently, about one-fourth of the world’s population uses social media and more than one billion internet users watch YouTube videos monthly (Knoll, 2016, pg. 266). As these social media sites gain popularity, businesses have also decided to enhance their internet presence by way of utilizing social media platforms as advertising mediums used for reaching consumers.

Social media strategies are advertising and marketing activities that generate participation, sharing and brand advocacy through the use of new technology platforms (Fields, 2014). Mobile media is increasingly dominating the digital world and social media efforts; in the UK, mobile connections reach 74.8 million subscriptions super-passing the total population by 117 %. The number of active social media accounts in mobile is 32 million achieving 50% of UK population (Kemp, 2015). To respond to such an environment many companies are centring their marketing efforts in a mobile first approach for their social strategies.

Social media networks additionally offer inexpensive and further direct advertisements for businesses on their websites of cost-per-click marketing. Facebook is the most popular social media website for social media marketing (Jain, 2012) and businesses favor this network from its cost effect advertisement. Facebook recently released the statistic that they have passed the milestone of having 1.23 billion active users’ on the network (Protalinski, 2014). Social media marketers take advantage of

Social media use isn’t just an arbitrary ego boost for brands and individuals. It’s a driving factor in business, marketing, technology and so much more. We Are Social reports that 2.1 billion out of the 7.2 billion people in the world now have social media accounts. Americans certainly fall into the mix, with 60% using it for their news fix, but at the same time they’re also doing other things like viewing ads. This means that you absolutely cannot ignore the impact of these huge and varied platforms on advertising, marketing and promotion. Let’s try to look into some examples of smart, creative and efficient use of social media to see what works.

Social media is used to define the online means of communication, collaboration, share, and cultivation between interdependent platforms (Tuten and Solomon, 2014) and social media marketing is the use of social media to induce consumers to buy or support a brand, company, website, etc (Barker et al., 2013). Today’s advertisements are much more interactive and specially designed for a targeted customer because social media provides this facility. Also, it helps companies to track customer’s age, gender, habits in a way to adapt their products and reach them more easily.

Notwithstanding it simplified the process of marketing to some extend, online channel is never easy to manage. Instead, it includes multiple formats of communication aiming at variety of target customers, such as banner ads appearing on web sites, personalized e-mails sent by organization marketers and so forth (Palmer& Koenig-Lewis, 2009). Consistent with this media revolution, in recent years, social media, which further decrease the cost of communication for companies tremendously, has become a major hit in marketing and media field (Palmer & Koenig-Lewis, 2009).

This result show a similar result with the online advertisement channels, the most commonly click-on web advertisement are social media ad and follow by adwords advertisement and email advertisement. A recent study has shown that social media is become more important as an online channels for company to communicate with their potential customer through the act of sharing and participating in a variety of post and activities. (Ashley and Tuten, 2014)

Facebook is a free, widely used social networking tool that allows anyone to craft an online profile and use it to connect with others (Rouse, 2014). On Facebook, businesses currently have many options to choose from to promote their business. One example is by using external ads that send users to the domain of your choosing for a fee—considered the “classic” ad (Marrs, 2013) but users can also create an online identity for their business that they can then use to interact with customers on a closer, more human level—especially when users hit that precious “like” button (Marrs, 2013). When choosing the classic route, users have access to a great deal of valuable tools and information such as targeted advertisement, the ability to set budgets for their ads as well as performance tools that let the company how the ads are working for them (Marrs, 2013). A similar tool is Facebook’s “sponsored posts” which allows companies to pay a fee in exchange for Facebook showing their post to a chosen audience (Marrs, 2013).

Every day, marketing professional come up with new ways in which they can market their products to consumers successfully. Marketing of products has significantly changed following the invention of the internet. The enormous popularity of the internet in the past decade has opened doors for marketers in a manner that one could not have imagined twenty years ago. Marketers utilize the internet for the purpose of advertising products in a great way than other media outlets such as television, magazines, newspapers, and radio. Online social networking platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn have become a new big thing in which marketers advertise their product on the internet. More than 67% of the global community have joined one or more social media platforms making them the most successful ways marketers can advertise their products[7]. Online direct marketing is also another way marketers create awareness to the consumers regarding their new or existing products and services. Banner advertisement on the internet is another method of online advertisement. It allows consumers to obtain information on issues they want by clicking the banners of their choice [7]. Contrary to the traditional methods of advertising, online advertising allows consumers to interact with the marketers. Consumers get clarification of issues they may have regarding the advertisement while the marketers can get immediate feedback from the

Marketers for the longest time relied on market research to help them determine where to spend their advertising budget on whether that was on television, radio and print advertising. However, over the past few years, research organizations have begun analyzing how consumers behave on social networks. Modern day marketers are now highly relying on digital marketing especially social media.