The Benefits and Risks of Social Media Marketing

The Benefits and Risks of Social Media Marketing

Definition of Social Media Marketing –

The use of social media websites and social networks to market a company’s products and services. Social media marketing provides companies with a way to reach new customers and engage with existing customers (Radcliffe, 2017).

How Social Media Marketing can be used –

Value comes not from the platform itself but from how a particular social media platform is used. More importantly, social media applications have the potential to provide additional value beyond familiar e-commerce activities such as distributing content or driving sales because they enable the formation of online customer communities (Culan et al. 2010).

A useful link here for a quick insight into what Social Media Marketing can be used for: https://www.bluefountainmedia.com/blog/advantages-of-social-media-marketing/

Benefits of Social Media Marketing –

Increased Brand Recognition – New channels for your brand’s voice and content, which is important as it gives another channel for new/existing customers to find information on your brand and products. By focusing on the right channels and balancing the content, you can increase brand recognition and penetrate to your target market.

Social media channels are a key way to interact with customers and build those human relationships (Sklar, 2013). Which can be pivotal when the customer then comes to choose whether to invest in your product and can make the difference. As customers are more informed and have more choice than ever before, so if their expectations aren’t met, they’ll move on quickly (Sklar, 2013).

Specifically, social media can offer a powerful way to track your brand awareness online. This can be done in several ways. Conversation can be tracked to see what customers are saying about your firm and measure change in this over time (Frederiksen, 2015). This can be measured through ‘Social listening tools’ such as Echobot (Echobot, 2017). Also, you can track the expansion of your reach online by your number of followers, fans, and contacts.

‘Viral’ Campaigns – Can be described as an ‘internet meme’ and is often a video, image or a story that spreads rapidly across the internet. Sometimes memes are randomly spread or can be controlled (Brown, 2011). An example of this is a recent viral campaign run by Poundland on twitter, which became an instant internet hit by sharing controversial ‘elf on the shelf’ images (Shown below). Viral campaigns can create massive amounts of traffic to your social medias but however are extremely hard to pull of and tend to require the ‘bandwagon effect’. They tend to not last long and are faddish but do give a huge surge in traffic (Brown, 2011).

Promotion Tool – You can use your social media page to offer exclusive deals on products or services, which can attract customers to your page. Even use it to gain customers to other marketing channels in Chaffey’s model, such as offering a deal if you sign up to the email list (Litster, 2017).