The Emergence of Social Media Marketing

Twenty years ago, upon waking up, a person would probably stretch first or brush their teeth before anything else. Fast forward to 2017, what most people would probably do after waking up would be to check their cellphones for that message that came in while they were asleep, that post that came up on their newsfeed while they were offline or that controversial tweet from a celebrity or politician. Social media has now become a norm. And with the constant improvement of mobile data coverage, convenience of access to social media has been getting better as well. Thus increasing people’s consumption of social media through mobile devices.

Businesses have recognised this. So more than just placing image ads on the side of the Facebook website to keep up with the times and stay relevant, companies have created brand pages (launched in 2007) that would allow them to not only propagate their brand image, but to also engage with people and get direct feedback without the need to fund a below the line marketing effort to go all over an entire country. And now, a company having a Facebook page is almost as important as having its own website. People get to see brands online, they get to engage with it, and companies are able to get direct feedback to know which demographic they are winning or which product is doing very well or not so good. This is now widely known as social media marketing.

Placing ads and only spending money for it to reach a brand’s intended market is now better than ever. Traditional marketing usually meant getting as much eyeballs to see your ad in hopes of probably having a fraction of that find your ad relevant. But in social media marketing, brands are allowed to define what their ideal audience is. For example, setting up a campaign in Facebook starts out with the strategy that a brand wants to implement. Depending on the objectives, a brand can have an ad to either generate brand awareness, generate brand consideration or generate conversion. After selecting a strategy, the target audience is now created, starting with basic data such as geographic location, age and gender. It is further narrowed by selecting demographics, interests and behaviours.

One advantage that social media marketing has compared to traditional marketing or even some forms of digital advertising is that metrics that are gathered come from existing profiles that need to be used for it to count. You can essentially put a face to every interaction your ad receives in social media. And combining that with the fact that you can pull reports that are segmented by either age, gender, region, device or platform makes creating a marketing decision more reinforced. Sure, social media marketing is not an all-in-one marketing platform. Nothing is. But the advantages it has cannot be overlooked. It should no longer be in the nice-to-have portion of a company’s marketing plan, but a perennial part of a company’s annual budget, working side by side with other marketing efforts to make a brand more visible in a diverse way.

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