Use Of Social Media Strategy

BSNS 106 Essay Jonty McMillan

In the Harvard Business Review, Soumitra Dutta wrote an article called “What's Your personal Social Media Strategy” and stated that “Social media are here to stay. They are changing the way we do business and how leaders are perceived, from the shop floor to the C-suite” I agree with Soumitra’s statement and this article will discuss if businesses should develop organisational social media strategies.

Social media is “Websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking”[1]. Social media marketing is the use of internet based platforms (social media) to advertise and broadcast companies to the world. The use of social media for marketing has many benefits and this has been proven numerous times. It can be risky for some companies but the opportunity for benefit outweighs the small risk and therefore I believe companies should develop social media marketing strategies.

Social media platforms run on the internet and in recent years the use of internet has skyrocketed. There has been an increase of internet users in the world from 1% in 1995 to an astonishing 39% in 2014[2]. The market size of the internet is immense, with over 2.9 billion people connected. The largest social media platform on the internet, Facebook, has 1.3 billion monthly users. Facebook has millions of different companies advertising through the platform and these companies on average receive an return on investment of 153%[2]. Youtube is a video sharing website that allows users to upload and view videos on demand. It has one billion users that in 2012 recorded an average of 4 billion video views per day. Advertisers spent $5.6 billion on youtube last year alone[3]....

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...hey continue to be one of the largest fast food sellers worldwide. They continue to promote McDonalds all over social media, and as a result have great customer relations with regular giveaways and promotions. This shows that although there are risks involved in social media marketing, the risks are not even close to the benefits it can provide.

Social Media marketing is obviously changing the way businesses run their marketing operations today. It helps businesses reach out to customers in many ways whilst developing relationships and a public image. It is an endless opportunity that if your target audience and your resources are correctly identified and put to use you can reap the benefits. It can be risky for some companies but the opportunity for benefit outweighs the small risk and therefore I believe companies should develop social media marketing strategies.