The Role Of Social Media In Marketing

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Explore the role of Social media/networking in marketing

Marketing is defined as ‘the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large’ (American Marketing Association July 2013). With the emergence of social media as an integral part of everyday life, marketing has also adapted to use this tool to gain their products wider recognition as they attempt to use this vast amount of information to their own benefit. As of July 11th 2014, twitter had 645 million users with an average number of tweets per day of 58 million (Statistica 2014). Twitter is only the tip of the iceberg with other social media outlets such …show more content…

It has opened up strategies which before would have seemed inefficient or hopeful and may have been dismissed as impractical due to the difficulty in transferring information at a fast enough rate to create a buzz around a product. One of the main benefits of social media’s appearance is the massive increase in word of mouth being used to promote different events. This isn’t always towards business use as it has been used to start movements such as the Arab spring. Businesses have seen this potential and have tried to harness its power to get a far reaching advertisement of their product for relatively small amounts of capital. Different advertisement methods have been used such as Felix Baumgartner’s highest skydive for redbull is an example of this as it gained traction through word of mouth. ‘Word of mouth is the primary factor behind 20 to 50 percent of all purchasing decisions’ (McKinley …show more content…

Social media is effective at hitting the right people for the right product and making sure that a target demographic sees the product. Is this better than conventional marketing methods? This is circumstantial as many products may do better being seen by a wider audience that are forced to watch an advert as on many social networking sites, consumers can skip over any adverts without even noticing they are there. Furthermore, forms of marketing such as viral can be inconsistent and carries a high risk of failure due to the nature of hoping that consumers carry the message. Moreover, viral marketing can sometimes not get the message of the product across and can often times be seen as just a social activity as seen in the example used previously, ALS’s ice bucket challenge where people would do the challenge but would have no idea what it was for and did it simply for fun. On the other hand, social media is still growing and shows no signs of diminishing. Businesses who do not get a foothold in social media risk falling behind to competitors as the movement online continues. The depth and range of social media advertising means a vast array of consumers can be hit from across the globe at minimal cost to a business. Viral marketing and communities can be seen as cheap but effective forms of getting product information to customers and therefore can only be of benefit to any

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