Social Media as a Marketing Tool
Recently, social media has become a global tool for social networking, data sharing and online accessing database. Due to its consistency features, social media has opened a wide place for businesses to implement their marketing strategy. Marketing which mostly occurs via social media is currently known as social media marketing. This strategy of marketing has made possible for companies to reach targeted consumers easily, efficiently and immediately. Besides its benefits, social media marketing also faces several disadvantage in the matter. Therefore, this article argues the benefits and challenges for marketers in the social media marketing field for small and large businesses.
According Michael Stelzner in the 2015 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, the top two benefits of social media marketing is to increase exposure and traffic with 90 percent of marketers citing and 77 percent reporting increased traffic. Another 69 percent use social media marketing to develop loyal fans (Stelzener, 2015). For instance: As long as the publicity is out there it is likely positive to get consumers immediately through a global database. In a copy of Communication World last year; Angelo Fernando talked about this issue of getting people talking about your brand and the main focus was to create brand awareness and increase traffic:
Let’s say, you are attending to a place with a pleasant social environment. You walk in with a box of wine. Rather
Social media is different from more traditional marketing tactics as it offers a free platform that is easily accessible to anyone with internet access. This allows for the increase communication for organizations to foster brand awareness and often, and
Using social media for marketing can enable small business looking to further their reach to more customers. Your customers are interacting with brands through social media; therefore, having a strong social media presence on the web is the key to tap into their interest. If implemented correctly, marketing with social media can bring remarkable success to your business.
Social media has grown into one of the most useful digital marketing tools for business owners and corporations and is designed to feed us information at a fast-moving speed. There are many advantages to this development as well as disadvantages. Information is easily obtainable, instant and causes credibility issues. It is important to know and understand all the benefits and disadvantages before using social media because it can alter how a person may use it.
A large amount of information was collected from the articles and journals that were reviewed. All of the information that was looked at was in favor of using social media as a marketing strategy. It can be determined from the first article reviewed that while television advertising and e-mail marketing are effective means of marketing, social media is even more effective. This quote from the article “…consumers that have a greater motivation to find information, have a greater desire to socialize online and use the Internet are more likely to become part of the firm’s social media site” means that using social media puts the company in the perfect position to connect with consumers who are already there (Kumar, Ashish, et al, From Social to Sale). Another article reviewed shares the four most important aspects of social media marketing. The author lists them in order: organizational competence, customer engagement with social media, individual commitment, and organizational commitment (The Use of Social Media in Sales, Guesalaga). These four aspects are essential in having a successful social media marketing campaign. Organizational competence refers to the company’s knowledge, productivity, and expertise with social media (Guesalaga). Customer engagement refers to engaging the customer through methods such as commenting and messaging on forms of social media. Thirdly, there is individual commitment (Guesalaga).
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.
Clever marketers already know about this benefit which is one of the reasons why they were the first ones to use social media. Research has shown that by creating social media strategies small businesses are creating new ways to connect with their customers. A recent survey revealed that the best benefits of social media marketing are producing more business publicity, increasing traffic, and increasing search engine rankings. All of these benefits are particularly imperative for small businesses with reduced capital as the owners frequently have many positions in the company and consequently have many requests. Social media can play a major part in helping small business owners save money and cost by forming a way to accomplish many assignments at the same time making sure that business operations are efficient and finances are taken care of. (Schaupp and Belanger 187). The most important economic factor in social media marketing is the time it takes to understand the benefits of all of the hard work. Nevertheless, advertising costs could possibly be decreased or removed by taking advantage of using social
A study that was conducted in 2012 showed that a consumer's commitment to a company was influenced by word of mouth (Bell, 2013). So, it is not hard to believe social media plays a role in brand loyalty. This type of loyalty starts with companies being interactive with their consumers. By being interactive, a company is able to build relationships and have immediate access to its consumers. The trust that develops between the company and the consumer enables the consumer to have a sense of devotion to that company. With that being said, it can be concluded that this works just like any normal relationship. Any relationship needs to have some sort of loyalty and trust. Therefore, social media is a great tool for companies to use in order to strengthen brand
Having an effective marketing strategy is important requirement in order to saturate the market successfully. Social media is one of the many varieties of advertising outlets a company can use. A company needs to have a strong advertising plan in place, use a variety of outlets, and know when and where the media will run, otherwise known as the media mix (Cadotte, 2003 p.165). Social Media has grown as an outlet for marketing over the last few years and will continue to grow as the social media outlets grow. Companies now need to integrate social media into their marketing strategy in order to stay competitive.
Social media poses significant obstacles and opportunities for companies. As Qualman (2010, p. xiii) states, social media pervades literally every facet of a company's existence, yet despite this (or perhaps because of this) social media seems to resist easy definition. For the purposes of this paper, social media refers to the ways in which a company communicates using digital media. On the one hand, there are a number of ways in which a company can now market themselves to the public; on the other hand, a company accustomed to traditional marketing strategies will be negatively affected if they do not integrate social media strategies. In this paper, a number of strategies are provided for online marketing, relating to advertisement, customer service, and communication within the company itself.
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
A pros of social media marketing for business is social media marketing is low cost and makes it appealing for business. When we using media social such as Facebook, Instagram are practically free to join, so we can promote our business at there without need any cost. Next, a media social also as a tool for interacting with other people are all available for free. For instance, we have communicate or communication with customers using media social, it also free means not need a cost. But to get more profit in marketing for our business we can investing on a full social media marketing strategy. In social media marketing strategy, we need a little cost
Social media marketing?is a way for businesses to increase online traffic and brand awareness through?social media?sites.? Social media marketing programs attempt to attract attention and encourage readers to share it across their?social networks. Social media sites create a virtual place where people with similar interests can communicate, build relationships, share ideas and exchange information and experiences with each other (Alvandi, Fazil & Amiri, 2014).
Social media can be used in very creative ways to market goods or services globally. Conducting business in other countries has been accelerated by various media platforms. Global marketing involves many challenges, and also involves a degree of corporate social responsibility.
The concept of social media marketing basically refers to the process of promoting business or websites through social media channels. It is a powerful marketing medium that is defining the way people are communicating. It is one of the significantly low-cost promotional methods that provide businesses large numbers of links and huge amount of traffic. Companies manage to get massive attention and that really works in favor of the business. Social media marketing is a potent method applied by progressive companies for selling their products/services or for just publishing content for ad revenue.