Marketing and advertising is a relatively recent concept and was first coached as a subject matter at tertiary level within the 1950’s. A very simple definition of marketing is:” to create an atmosphere that is responsive to services or products to be sold to a market”. Marketing has four legs (called the four P’s of marketing), i.e.: Product, Price, Promotion and Packaging. Any type of advertising or selling a product or service, falls in the family of Promotion, of which advertising is a part. So, social media marketing is an element of the Promotional component of marketing.
Social media marketing concerns the marketing of a product or solutions, via the social media, which includes the world wide web and mobile devices, like cell phones and PC tablets. This clearly is a very much newer means of marketing and has flourished with a force over the past decade, but in the past 3-5 years particularly it has attained incredible power of persuasion. Just think about the strength of social media marketing, in considering the following facts: America has a teen population of some 22 million. It is estimated that teenagers in the USA has a direct affect on the spending of 60% of the family income. Seventy-five percent of USA teens own mobile devices, of which females (15-18) do up to around 80 texts a day and boys 30 each day. This excludes any world wide web activity on social media sites. The use of cellular phones and other mobile media thus remains thoroughly entrenched in the American population and is quite certainly a significant probability to social media marketing. Similar statistics can be applied to Europe, The UK and Australia.
There is virtually no retailer of note these days that does not have multiple links to social bookmarking internet pages like Face Book, Twitter and others. There is even a social media web site devoted to professionals for displaying their expert detail with a link to getting in contact with them. All of the above demonstrates the potential scope for marketers in the world of mobile devices. The amount of individuals 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 seemingly lies in human actions, 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 that any social media marketing has to 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 networking sites, apart from the original marketing/ marketing campaign launched by the marketers to individuals.
Social media marketing unquestionably is a very impressive marketing channel if used effectively and it has an enormous potential market.