Why The Buzz In Social Media Marketing?

Advertising is a relatively recent idea and was first taught as a subject at tertiary level in the 1950′s. A basic concept of marketing is:” to create a setting that is receptive to services or products to be sold to a market”. Marketing has 4 legs (called the 4 P’s of marketing), i.e.: Product, Price, Promotion and Packaging. Any kind of advertising or selling a product, falls in the family of Promotion, of which advertising is a part. So, social media marketing is a component of the Promotional component of marketing.

Social media marketing concerns the marketing of a product or services, via the social media, which includes the online world and mobile devices, like cellular phones and PC tablets. This clearly is a very much newer method of marketing and it has flourished with a force over the past 10 years, but in the past 3-5 years in particular it has achieved incredible power of persuasion. Consider the power of social media marketing, in thinking about the following facts: America has a teen population of some 22 million. It is estimated that teenagers in the USA has a primary influence on the spending of 60% of the family income. Seventy five percent of USA teenagers own mobile devices, of which young ladies (15-18) do up to around eighty text messages a day and boys 30 each day. This excludes any web activity on social media sites. The use of mobile phones and other mobile media is therefore thoroughly entrenched in the American population and is quite evidently an enormous probability to social media marketing. Similar statistics can be applied to Europe, The UK and Australia.

There’s hardly a retailer of note today that doesn’t have multiple links to social networking internet pages like Face Book, Twitter as well as others. There is even a social media web site focused on professionals for displaying their skilled detail with a link to contacting them. All of the above demonstrates the possible scope for marketers in the world of mobile devices. The numbers of people are there, the technology is there and the right target market is out there. So, is social media marketing a great success? The answer to such question appears to be a qualified ‘yes’. Why a qualified ‘yes’, only to the question of whether social media marketing is a success? The answer apparently lies in human conduct, but such behaviour can be circumvented by clever marketing technique. In the first instance there is a natural instinct of individuals to be resistant against marketing and secondly, young adults, today, like to tell and not to be told by any power. This means any social media marketing must solicit conversation with its audience and establish itself as an ‘influencer’ of authority in any given topic, and as such become a ‘social authority’ on a particular subject or product or service. Once users start talking about such topic among them, credibility is established and the principal of viral marketing kicks in, whereby the value of the product or service being marketed, is spread by the users of social networks, apart from the original marketing/ marketing campaign launched by the marketers to individuals.

Social media marketing undoubtedly is a very impressive marketing channel if used effectively and it has an enormous potential market.