The New Trend in Advertising

ELECTRONIC-Commerce How It Is Affecting American Industry The Internet over the past few years has seen a huge increase in online businesses and consumers. Electronic-commerce is expected to generate $36 billion in revenue during 1999, up 140% from last year alone. [1] With such a huge amount of money to be made on the Internet it is becoming very appealing for small businesses and start-up companies to try and make their niche in e-commerce. The Internet is drastically affecting the way companies and people conduct business now. E-commerce encourages growth in existing as well as new businesses because of lower overhead costs, the huge consumer base and the freedom of information flow.

Both companies were launched in 1995 and are still extremely successful. The creation of e-mail in 1996 had a huge impact on the development of online retail by introducing a fast and easy way to communicate with customers. For this two-year period Internet usage doubled annually, thus, allowing for the expansion of the industry. Google is launched a year later, in 1998, only to become the most used search engine in the world and an essential partner for the online retailers by helping them tailor their websites to customer’s personal preferences and by advertising. After that, more and more people see the opportunity in the growing industry and enter it.

Established in February 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook is a privately-owned social networking website that helps people and companies communicate, socialize, understand, engage and transact more efficiently and effectively with friends, family, colleagues, employees, customers and relevant targets. Facebook is the dominant social network in over 100 countries and has more than 1.19 billion monthly active users, it's growth of members in the past few years has been phenomenal (only less than 10 years). Facebook has a powerful business model. Even though the most active group will however be the 16-45 year olds, Facebook’s diversification is an ingenious growth strategy. This is because it not only has the largest growth of members but also has the largest percent of active users.

Customers have more choices than ever on how to spend their dollar with the abundance of stores and catalogs (Maruca, Jul/Aug 1999). These conditions have lead retailers to search for a different channel by which to reach consumers. A relatively new development has been the introduction of Internet-based retailing. It is estimated that online sales have tripled between 1997 and 1998, reaching roughly nine billion dollars. With the growing number of households joining the Web each day, projections indicate no signs of slowing down anytime soon (Anonymous, Aug 1999).

People and companies online have paid more attention to the money and profit in the past few years. Even though this brought people problems, like making people more selfish, monetization under government regulation to protect users' rights, like privacy, would help the internet to develop. Online monetization and E-commerce should keep running with the expansion of internet under proper government regulation, which will help the development of internet. Usage of internet has increased dramatically. In March, 2000, there were 304 million internet users, which were 5% of Global population; in March 2013, this number has grown to 2749 million, which were 38.8% of Global population (“Internet Growth Statistics”).

How to increase business with Social Media Marketing Did you know more than 92% of small business owners strongly agree to the importance of social media marketing for business? Or that social media marketing has a 100% higher lead-to-close rate than outbound marketing? According to Marketing Guru Neil Patel- “Social media is the fastest growing trend in the history of the world.” What is social media marketing? As per Wikipedia “Social media marketing is the process of gaining website traffic or attention through social media sites.” However, Neil Patel again defines it appropriately Regardless of the industry, you serve, investing in social media marketing will help your organization grow. Not only in terms of dollar-dollar bills

Since the creation of the Internet, businesses have used it as an outlet to advertise increasing customers and revenue, but with the creation and popularity of social media websites, the ways companies advertise online changed. Businesses could no longer simply post an ad on a website and wait, they had to be more involved, creating a whole new challenge to advertising via social media website. By the end of 2011, approximately 31 billion dollars will have been spent for online advertising (Chmielewski), with social media websites claiming 11% of that (Indvik). This statistic alone shows just how important businesses believe it is to advertise on social websites, however for a business to be successful with a social media advertising campaign today, it takes much more than just money. Companies online must be engaged, informative, available, and interesting to increase customer interest as well as profits.

"Surfing the Web" has become easier since its inception, and the number of users has skyrocketed into the millions (Department of Education). Within the last couple of years, however, arguments have arisen concerning children's safety on the Internet. Contributing factors to some recent events have been traced to the Internet, and rules regulating Internet use have commenced at schools and libraries across the country. While this is happening, Congress has been trying to censor the Internet to protect juvenile users. Some organizations, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, believe that such regulation of the Internet is a violation of free speech, a constitutional right.

Sending and receiving mails, shopping online and advertising have change the way of business. In “Why the Internet is Important in Business,” Chris Blank (n.d) argues that every big and small businesses know the significance of creating a website and social media pages for the company. According to Blank (n.d) having a social media page or a website will increase the publicity of the business. For example, Old Spice is an old company and it needed to boost its sales; to do that they made crazy and funny advertising and posted them in YouTube and Twitter. After 7 month the company sales increased by 107 percent.

Now the Internet is growing faster than any other telecommunications system ever built. It is estimated that in three years, the system will be used by over 100 million people (Cooke 61). Since the World Wide Web (WWW or W3) became popular through point-and-click programs that made it easier for non-technical people to use the Internet, over 21,000 businesses and corporations have become accessible through the Internet (Baig 81). These companies range from corporate giants like IBM, AT&T, Ford and J.C. Penny, to small law firms. "With the Internet, the whole globe is one marketplace and the Internet's information-rich WWW pages can help companies reach new customers," says Bill Washburn, former executive director of Commercial Internet Exchange (Baig 81).