Influence of social media on Marketing

June 20, 2023

Source; (Karo, 2022)

Importance of social media

Social media has become the most powerful tool in 21^st century by eradicating all sorts of communication barriers despite geographical location, race, ethnicity, age, and all other disparities. It helps to share the most crucial thing in the current world which is “Information” in related to all personal, public, official, political and recreational activities within a very short period more effectively. In simple terms, social media makes interactions with people by way of designing, creating, and sharing their own ideas and information through virtual platforms among networks and communities. Accessibility to information has become one click away from anywhere in the world with social media. Different types of social media platforms enable users to create and share their information in many ways such as blogs, messages, posts, and videos within a second.

Source : (Chaffey, 2023)

The world population is around 8.0Bn in 2023 and 4.8Bn people use social media, which is around 60% of the world population. The average daily time spent using social media is 2 hours and 24 minutes, reflecting people’s active engagement with social media regularly.

Facebook, YouTube, and WhatsApp are the most used social media platforms by 2023 while other platforms such as Instagram, WeChat, TikTok, FB Messenger, Douyin, Telegram, Snapchat, Kuai Shou, Sina Weibo, QQ, Twitter, and Pinterest also perform having more than 400Mn users.

Source: (Kemp, 2023)

Therefore, marketing managers in almost all businesses use highly popularized social media platforms to ease their duties in many ways.

Modern-day marketing research with social media

Marketing is all about searching, identifying, and satisfying people’s requirements by earning profits (Kotler and Keller, 2019). This is a recurring process of reaching customer needs profitably. The initial part of the marketing process is searching for suitable customer needs and has become more challenging with expanded human needs and wants in the current world. Most companies spend millions on their expenses searching for the correct customer needs as it is one of the most important parts of designing suitable products and services to satisfy customer needs. If they are unable to search the exact requirements of customers, all of their efforts and money end in vain, making losses.

Social media plays an important role in searching for customer needs as lots of primary data are available on social media platforms. Marketing managers can execute their primary and secondary market research referring to social media with ease saving time and cost with numerous benefits as follows.

1. Collect personal data and insights

2. Enhanced customer engagement

3. Easy to identify social trends and preferences

4. Assess competitors and research

5. Low cost for research execution

6. Ability to arrange surveys and polls via social media platforms

Social media advertising

After market research and product development, businesses can utilize social media platforms to promote their products by way of digital marketing mechanisms in a more effective manner as follows.

1. Enhanced brand awareness – the brand can be aggressively marketed with social media platforms having 24/7 reach to the target audience

2. Direct involvement with final product users – Social media portals allows businesses to keep direct connections with end users without any intermediary

3. Easy on client segmentation – Advertisements can be more focused on specified client segments with social communities in social platforms

4. Increased customer loyalty – social media platforms create more loyal customers toward businesses with their feedback and comments

5. Affordable advertising – Compared to other traditional advertising, social media advertising is cheaper and more effective

6. User-friendly platforms

7. Speed connectivity

8. More creativity – Companies can showcase their advertising more advanced way with more control using the social media

9. High client conversion rate

Overall, social media has become a top influential aspect of the marketing field due to its unparallel unique features and assist the marketing managers from A to Z to execute their duties more efficiently.