Why The Hoopla In Social Media Marketing?

Advertising and marketing is a quite recent strategy and was initially tutored as a subject matter at tertiary level within the 1950′s. A basic specification of marketing is:” to develop an atmosphere that is open to goods and services to be sold to a market”. Marketing has four legs (known as the four P’s of marketing), i.e.: Product, Price, Promotion and Packaging. Any kind of advertising or selling a product, falls in the category of Promotion, of which advertising is a part. So, social media marketing is a component of the Promotional aspect of marketing.

Social media marketing concerns the marketing of a product or services, via the social media marketing, which includes the web and mobile devices, like mobile phones and PC tablets. This obviously is a very much newer means of marketing and it has flourished with a force over the past decade, but in the past 3-5 years especially it has attained incredible power of persuasion. Just think about the power of social media marketing, in thinking about the following facts: America has a teenage population of some twenty two million. It’s estimated that teenagers in the USA has a primary affect on the spending of 60% of the family money. Seventy five percent of USA adolescents own mobile devices, of which young women (15-18) do up to around eighty texts a day and boys 30 per day. This excludes any web activity on social networking sites. The use of cellular phones and other mobile media is therefore thoroughly entrenched in the American population and is quite evidently a significant opportunity to social media marketing. Similar statistics can be applied to Europe, The UK and Australia.

There’s hardly a retailer of note these days that doesn’t have multiple links to social media internet sites like Face Book, Twitter and others. There is even a social networking web site devoted to professionals for displaying their skilled detail with a link to contacting them. 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 crowd 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 intelligent marketing technique. In the first instance there is a natural instinct of people to be resistant against marketing and secondly, young people, today, like to tell and not to be told by any authority. Which means any social media marketing has to solicit conversation with its target 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 without doubt is a very potent marketing channel if used effectively and it has an enormous potential market.