Today, Social media marketing is taking the front seat as far as the practice of marketing is concerned. Social media marketing is taken as the process of gaining web traffic and attention by means of social sites. Social media marketing campaigns concentrate on creating content that will draw the attention of readers who in turn share the information with friends and acquaintances (Zarrella). The corporate message stretches from a user to another and appear more convincing coming from a trusted acquaintance as opposed to when it comes directly from the company. This form of advertising is referred to as word of mouth advertisement. The results from this form of marketing are rather earned than paid for.
What exactly is a social network?
The process of enlarging social contacts through getting in touch with other individuals fits in the description of a social network. Social networking has been around way before the internet was invented. In fact it could be termed to be as old as the society itself. However, the discovery of the internet has moved social networking experience to a whole new level as the potential of the internet to advance social connection is being felt today.
Social media is an umbrella for all the sites that offer various social actions e.g. Twitter, LinkedIn, facebook, MySpace among others. Twitter is a socialnetwork intendedto allow people share short messages andupdates with others. Facebook on the other hand is a network that let people share photos, updates events and other activities. Twitter is known for its speed and the fun it offers its users. One can describe his business in a statement of 140 characters only. Journalists seem to favor the site due to its capabilities of disseminating useful information e.g. articles. Today Journalists get most of their stories from the social media.
Another famous social site is LinkedIn. This social network distinguishes itself by presenting itself as a strict professional network. Owing this fact, most corporate and small businesses use it as an on-net resume. People post their work experiences, samples of the work they do and even an option to invite other references is available at this site.
Facebook as a marketing tool
Who is on facebook? The answer to this question is obvious, everyone that’s why every corporate and individual business needs to make serious considerations about joining the social platform. In the recent past, Facebook has proven itself as one of the most efficient marketing too. For facebook adverts, a reveal tab gives a new visitor a clear call to action. The site allows the visitor to first like the fan page so that they can have free trials and special information. These features considerably enlarge the fan conversation rates and confer value in becoming a fan. The social site is heightening its efforts to become more open about how the site’s news feed works. Facebook declares that it has engineered a new algorithm that helps identify and display high quality content to the user. This new package is set to be launched in a few moths time. The new changes are feedback related addressing questions such as whether the content being displayed to a user comes from a trusted source. A research study shows that the recent changes made on facebook search algorithm has led to an increased level of interactions ie likes and comments from the users. An analysis by the global social network kenshoo social reveals that facebook advert clients greatly improved in the 3rd quarter with the 2nd quarter earnings over 85 billion ad impressions. The third quarter saw facebook increase its ad impression by 13%, the conversation rate rose by 3 times, revenues by 2 times and return on investment by 3 times (Zarrella).
Several aspects fuelled this impressive ad performance for the social site. The first dynamic is that the social media has continuously simplified and improved its ads products through delivering extremely highperforming news feed stock, deeper audience targeting techniques and catchier image formats. The new features have enabled markets across the globe to reach a larger group of prospective and current customers offering them more informative and relevant messages.
The second factor contributing the sites high marketing performance is that facebook users especially corporatehas continuously expressed their willingness to engage in product and brand advertising using the social site both online and offline. In addition, customers are constantly taking actions by making purchases from these businesses thanks to better relevant and engaging adverts made possible by facebook (Zarrella). The next brands of advertisers are gaining experience with facebook marketing and are employing sophisticated effective marketing strategies to steer their direct response goals. Brands are endorsing their key products, customizing ad messages and tracking customer’s response across free, paid and earned social media.
Statistics on the use of facebook marketing platform
Scheming over empirical report reveals the reasons why facebook should be the social media marketing platform of choice. Despite the recent rumor spreading across the news that facebook is getting older, the social network still remains the strongest across all age bracket a fact that is so valuable to all marketers.
A new report from BI intelligence reveals the demographics of facebook and why it remains a key platform for corporate advertising.
The social networks’ demographic shares with regards to income levels, gender and age diversity makes facebook the obvious take when it comes to social media as a marketing platform. The site has over 1 billion users currently. About 67% of internet users in the US are on the platform, 82% come from the UK. Facebook usage distribution skews young. In the United States, 83% of young people between the ages of 18-29 who use the internet are on the platform. This proportion stands at 67% across all the age brackets with the 45-54 age brackets growing by 46% by the end of 2012. In the US, a 735 of the users with incomes above $75000 use facebook compared to 17% on twitter and 13% on Pinterest. Facebook has become most popular on smart phones taking a 66% share in the iphone social media sharing. About 86% of facebook users live outside the US. In terms of gender, facebook is slightly skewed towards women but is more gender neutral than other platforms like Google+ and Pinterest.
The Arabian revolution:the influences of facebookand twitter
In the midst of a fierce argument across academic circles, an upcoming book makes an outright argument those social platforms: Facebook and Twitter played a major role in the successful uprising in the Arab countries of Tunisia and Egypt that helped encouragegrassroots movements in Arabic nations(Milstein).A piece of literary work by Phillip Howard argues that digital media was among others one of the key and necessary condition for the success of the Arab spring movements. For many years there existed longserving democratic movements in the two countries of which none really worked echoed Howard in his book. He said that authoritarian regimes were able to control the traditional media but could not stop or keep up with the pace used by social media especially twitter and facebook.
Some researcher like Sean Aday from George University argued that new media never appeared to play a significant role in the regional diffusion and thein nation collective action in the 2011 uprising (Milstein). This absence of impact does not necessarily mean social media was unimportant. Nevertheless, a study done in 2012 revealed that facebook posts and tweets contributed more in spreading information outside the affected nations and may have led to the effect that yielded international pressure to end autocratic regimes(Milstein). A lot of activist believe and argue that social media helps maintain the pressure of protests that originated in Tunisia and spread to Egypt and Libya. Social media especially Facebook offered new sources of Intel the regime could not handle or contain. This information was useful in shaping the type of decisions citizens made on participating in the protests. The activists say that social media helped in communicating the logistics of the planned protests and the possibilities of succeeding.
Today, even the supporters of social media express doubt of the Arabian effect spreading to other nations owing to new way of controlling information that has been devised by some regimes. In his book Howard says that activists adopted the use of social media to catch dictators’off guard but currently in the late spring, regimes have devised some tricks to counter the social media effect. He adds that the story of facebook and twitter may be a story of the past since dictators have perfected the art of using the same tools to control people but it would be wrong to give up on social media.
Twitter and marketing
Twitter is a micro-blogging tool i.e.deals in communicating short messages, thoughts and updates. Twitter was designed to go along with the cellphone text messages. A tweet has a limited capacity of 140 characters in every post. Social media is a big way to hold conversations with prospective customers, bloggers and business influencers. However, for CEOs, the case is a little different. These executives hardly afford the time to blog or write long messages after making friends like on facebook. Twitter is a great solution for such busy personnel since each tweet has a character limit of 140 letters (Milstein).Twitter tries to harness the ability to give short comments and thoughts. The argument of twitter is that if a CEO can write an SMS, then he can tweet as a marketing tool for his corporate. Following people on twitter is an easy ordeal and it comes as a surprise to many how other people decide to follow you. Twitter is an easy way to connect with influential people that may benefit one’s business in a positive way
A retail business that makes special offers can abundantly benefitfrom using twitter as the social media of choice since they are able to make such offers to a wide range of audiences. Twitter is growing fast as far as online communication is concerned. TechCrunch revealed that twitter is attracting over 8 million visitors each month and experiencing over 3 million tweets on a daily basis.Twitter offers a search engine that permits an individual to type in company names,topics, brands and personal names. It allows one to check the buzz level and see if there are negative comments about the business(Milstein). It’s a common scenario for corporate to post specials and sales on the social platform. A classic example of such corporate is Dell who do this in an attractive manner.
Statistics on the use of twitter marketing platform
On October 3 2013, twitter released to the market the social site’s s- 1 from. This document indicated revenues of $ 317 million for the year 2012 and revenues of about $245 million for the starting six month of 2013. A few days ago on October 16th, twitter unveiled the S-1 report for the first nine month that recorded a revenue of $ 168 million. Twitter is working on new accounts that will allow marketer to receive private messages from their customers. This will greatly assist companies that shy off from addressing customer concerns in the open.A rumor has it that twitter is developing an @Eventparrot account that will provide breaking news via private messages. Research has it that in the year 2013, twitter attracts about 97% of the famous top brands in the market compared to 67% in the year 2011.
How tweeter has transformed democracy
Since its inception seven years ago, twitter has transformed into a de facto world newswire. Unlike the well known news wire such as Reuters and AP, twitter is available to everyone on the planet to the extent of the US government using it to release government news before they get to the mainstream media. Twitter can turn ordinary bloggers into news reporters without them noticing it. A classic example is the false allegations that were spread on twitter about Lord McAlpine. Bile aggression that has recently been directed to women has forced the social site to cross check everything that passes through its servers (Milstein).
All through the august 2012 presidential election, tweets on the presidential candidates were being sent all over the internet. In October that year the presidential debate received well over 10 million tweets to rank as the most tweeted events in the history of the United States. Many political influencers used twitter to share real time political updates and news to the citizens.
Data collected by compete; a well known research firm reveals that the average twitter fan has a 68% chance of visiting a campaign donation hurdle than an average internet browser. Such visits increase when users are exposed to tweets that have political matters being discussed. This comes from either retweets, political handles followed by the useror political searches. Users exposed to such kinds of tweets hare twice likely to visit a political donation web page.
Compete reveals that political tweets contribute about 72% users who visit political tweets also visit political donation web pages. This indicates that twitter does not only make users to visit political donation sites but also creates the intent to make a donation to political campaigns (Milstein). The main factor driving twitter users to make political donations is the number of times they spot a particular political tweet in their own timeline. Compete discovered that users who repeatedly saw a political tweet more than twice had a 31% chance to make a donation than a twitter user who did not see such a tweet on several occasions. When the number of time a political tweet appears on a user 76-130% chance of donation is at the offing compared to average twitter users.
The data collected by compete did not allow the firm to analyze presidential candidates on separate basis. Nonetheless, donation lifts rates by users were more or less similar across all the presidential candidates. It is well known that tweeter users have a great interest in politics but the research revealed that political tweets fuel donations from the users.
Youtube marketing
Youtube is a video sharing webpage made by 3 former paypal employees in 2005 and was bought by goggle in 2006. The users upload share and watch videos steams enabled by adobe flash player and HTML5 platform to display a variety of user generated videos. The video contents range from movie clips, music video, TV clips as well as video blogging and educational clips. Most of the site’s content are uploaded by individual users with afew being associated with media corporate such as CBS, Vevo, BBC and Hulu. Unregistered youtube users cannot upload videos but can watch them for free. Videos found to possess offensive content can only be watched by registered users.YouTube is exploring ways on how todevelop topic specific videos and videos that are more interactive than those found in the traditional media. TheGoogle owned site has invested over$100 million meant to develop premium channels addressing areas such as business, dance food, dance, and fashionandeducation. In addition, the digital media wishes to develop a lean back viewer experience(Fisher).YouTube is more than a dog on skateboard digital media, it offers a good opportunity for corporate to market their business to the many YouTube users that visit the site on daily basis. Today many companies are resulting to using digital media as a way to reach to their potential customers. Creative indirect marketing has helped many corporate improve their customer relations. The platform works well with small enterprises since it demands a small budget to create the video and add some creativity.
You tube and news
YouTube partly serves as a news channel to the millions of users across the globe. Through its live stream channel, YouTube is able to deliver live activities mostly political taking place across the world. A good example was the 2013 Barrack Obama’s inauguration speech. YouTube freely offered the live stream of the inauguration speech and still has a complete account of the speech available for future reviews by its users(Fisher). Research shows that over 500 political candidates in office have official YouTube channels. You tube has grown a lot with regards to politics since the 2007 presidential debates to 2012 presidential announcement videos. As at 10thJune 2007, Political shows on you tube had a subscriber rank of 79 and a viewer rank of 24. The site had 3,254,258 subscribers and over 1 billion views within the year. Today over a billion unique users and viewers visit the media each month with over 6 billion hours of video being watched each month. Over 70% of traffic on you tube comes from outside the United States. The site is used in 56 countries covering 61 different languages.
Conclusion
Social media and digital marketing are the way to go if one’s business is to ake any meaningful progress I its industry. Many businesses have turned towards the social network and thus making it mandatory for every goal oriented business to market itself on this platform. Facebook, twitter, linkedIn, youtube and many other social network has greatly transformed the way businesses interact with its customers. Customers are now more confident to express their views about particular product defects. On the other hand, the business owners are able to gather better insight on the specific needs of their customers thus improving their delivery efficiency.
Work Cited
Zarrella, Dan, and Alison Zarrella. The Facebook Marketing Book. Beijing: O'Reilly, 2011. Print.
O'Reilly, Tim, and Sarah Milstein. The Twitter Book. Beijing: O'Reilly, 2009. Print.
Schaefer, Mark W. The Tao of Twitter: Changing Your Life and Business 140 Characters at a Time. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2012. Print.
Fisher, David E, and Marshall Fisher. Tube: The Invention of Television. Washington, D.C: Counterpoint, 2006. Print.
Tuten, Tracy L, and Michael R. Solomon. Social Media Marketing. Boston: Pearson, 2013. Print.
