SOCIAL MEDIA Introduction: Social media is a broad term to describe all the different kinds of content that form social networks: posts on blogs or forums, photos, audio, videos, links, profiles on social networking websites, status updates, and more. Social media allows people with no knowledge of coding or web development to upload and post unique content easily and share with the world instantly.
Simply put, social media is any kind of information we share with our social network, using social networking websites and services. Importance:Social media is gaining users and momentum, and it’s already making inroads into the mainstream. As such its importance is growing every single day. Social networks comprise more than your average geeks, with number of people using up at an alarming pace.
Facebook claims over 800 million users worldwide. In terms of growth, social networking is expanding much faster than the internet’s a whole. Social networks have been taken over by everyone, from college kids to business people to celebrities. News organizations, politicians, and even the president of the United States have been embraced social media. Brandon 2009) Advantages: On the internet, word of mouth spreads faster than you ever thought possible. A good or bad customer review or comment can be picked up by search engines.
Every time someone searches for your company, that review can be found. Now the review could be read by millions of viewers in a matter of days. As people gather online in social networks, they are talking about your products and services, whether you like it or not. Social media can be a powerful tool to help you spread the word about your products or services, but you have to participate in the conversation. Brandon 2009) Medium of Advertising: Google and Facebook have been increasingly used by companies as advertising medium because of their volume of users and the approach they follow to reach the advertisement to the right audience.
Facebook is a medium where you can listen, join, participate and create. While social media can have a very positive impact on your brand, you should be aware of a few caveats before starting out. Privacy: People value their privacy but a quick Google search can reveal all kinds of information. One should be aware of the Information they post in to the web.
Brandon 2009) Flexibility: There is no limit to the imagination. Advertisers can engage in affiliate marketing, here one site promotes another site’s products or services in exchange for some commission on the sale. (Dan 2010) Targeted message: The internet is the first mass medium able to offer a targeted, personal advertising Reach: Although the internet does not offer as broad a reach as television, campaigns that appear on a range websites can indeed reach a high proportion of everyone on the internet. Disadvantages:Clutter: when the internet was first developing as a consumer medium, there were only a few banner-type ads that appeared occasionally.
An estimated 4. 5 trillion display ads appeared on the screens of web users in 2008. While some of this may benefit advertisers the likely reaction is for consumers to see all of these as messages as ‘clutter’, which will lead them to avoid them as quickly as possible (Helen 2010). Non-standard metrics:Despite its use as an advertising medium for more than ten years, the internet has not yet developed fully standardized measurement metrics.
Each measurement service use slightly different methods to measure a different list of websites. Some sites try to sell advertising based on audience impressions, other on site visits, and yet others on actual sales. The interactive advertising bureau has worked hard, however, to standardize the ad unit sizes, so that there is consistency for the consumer, and for the creativity developers, on rectangular billboards, or pop-ups, or skyscraper ads.The guidelines include not only the size, but also recommendations on the size of the file that has to download onto the page it appears on, along with the duration of the ad.
(Helen 2010) References: 1. Brandon, E & Shayne, T (2009) ‘Online Marketing inside out’. 1st Ed. Collingwood. 2.
Helen. K (2010) “The Media Handbook”: A Complete Guide to Advertising Media Selection, 4th ed. Oxon: Routledge pp: 96-100 3. Dan. Z (2010) “The social Media Marketing Book”, 1st ed. Canada: O’Reilly Media Inc.
, pp-2-3
