The Future of Social Media

Whether social media will still be the trend in the future of business has been widely discussed, since this channel have both pros and cons. Regardless of the concerns of social media, it has proved itself to be a extremely powerful platform in many areas. Social media not only has impact on our personal lives, it also has huge impact on business, science, technology, job market, or even politics. In my previous posts I've been trying to find out the advantages, downside and limits of social media, and now it is time for us to look into the future.

You don't find products, they find you
The use of social media and big data will allow companies to find you, according to your preferences. For instance, your Facebook page may automatically show ads for new arrival spring outfit just because you have purchased similar outfit online before. (True story of my life). Even though you may not looking for it right now, social media will allow companies PUSH the products in front you and even evoke your action of actually buying it.

Companies try to find out the real ROI
According to my previous post, there are some methods to evaluate how effective social media is as a marketing tool. However, there has no single or universal rule of measuring social media's contribution to a company's revenue. If companies wants to continue use social media as marketing tool, they might have to find a way to do that. 

 Social Media + Mobile

Mobile apps are not new to business world, but what they can do are definitely worth developing. Your friends check-in at local cafe or restaurant, not only shows the geographical information, but also the most important thing, the information of the store. In this article the author mention five points about using social media on mobile. What brought my attention is the last one, affiliate payouts,which allows you to share what you bought online and encourage your friends to buy. Once your friends buy the product, you will receive some benefit from the company. Even though this will increase the possibility of sharing, in the other hand, it may also create a negative feeling of "my friend is using me to make money".

Social media management become more professional
As more and more social media are launching, more and more websites merge together and let user to be able to sign in from one access to multiple websites. The relationship between companies and customers become more complicated. Companies will have to draw a very clear blue print before they jump into social media, they must have clear and long-term strategy of it's objectives and approaches. Also, since customers are now more aware of the marketing methods of social media, companies will have to develop a more sophisticated and flexible model for marketing, and that, will require people with professional training and experiences in this area.

                     (You can add social media marketing as a skill on Linkedin)


I remembered I created my Facebook account in 2009, that is the time when my friends are all using Facebook and I join it under peer pressure. Now Facebook has become this whole new different media that make me more closer to some friends but also farther to some. Social media change the way I interact with this world and my social network. Although there are still a lot to be improve of social media, and lots of concerns, it is no doubt that social media will still be a very important part in the business world. I believe that we are very lucky to witness this revolution, and I expect more surprises to come.

Dislike?

Social Media has become the most popular marketing tool for the past few years. The benefits of using social media had attracted tons of company to change their marketing strategies and adopted social media as a key element in them. However, do social media guarantee these companies a “happily ever after” future?

I am very interested in the downside of social media since me myself don’t use social media as a channel for searching products I needed, and still wonder how attractive it is to customers.

According to a study from the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Project, 27% of Facebook users surveyed in the U.S. plan to spend less time on the site in 2013. (With only 3% plan to spend more). In U.S., people are starting to get tired of all kinds of social  media and don't think it is "cool" anymore. There are also all kinds of arguments about how social network is affecting our lives in a negative way. (Such as the second statistic of my last post!)

So, if we move to a business perspective, what are the downsides of using social media?

The risk of words of mouth

The spread of news nowadays is whole lot a different from the past. Blogs, social networks, video screening websites had make the news spread in a very fast pace. The good news is, if you got positive feed back from your customers, others will know soon. However, the bad news comes along, if you got negative feedback from customers, is also spread out incredibly fast and no matter it's true or not.

The sense of being manipulated

If the posts and comments are consistently positive on company's webpage, customers might think it is "too good to be true", and even generate a negative impression about the product. Also, another point that been discussed in my Digital Marketplaces class is that, customers might get the feeling that they are being manipulated by companies, and might ask themselves "What are they trying to do here?"

Privacy issue

Privacy issue has been a longtime concern of social media, and is still going on right now. There are so many social networking websites and most of them require some personal information from us when we register, such as email account, gender, cellphone number or our preference of certain product. These information can be use to make profit, besides, how do we know that these company won't sell out our information?
If a customer has concern about his/her private information, there is a great chance that he/she will reduce the chance of using social media, or even resist using it.

Social media has already proved itself as an effective way of promote product or increase brand awareness, but the customers are still watching, and companies should be more careful when using it.

Interesting Statistic

I was researching for my next post and find some very interesting statistic. 

A website that provide a different aspect of social media/network display some interesting fact about social media:

1. Social networking sites are the top news source for 27.8% of Americans, ranking below newspapers (28.8%) and above radio (18.8%) and print publications (6%).
2. Students who used social networking sites while studying scored 20% lower on tests and students who used social media had an average GPA of 3.06 versus non-users who had an average GPA of 3.82.
3. 35 global heads of state, every US Cabinet agency, 84% of US state governors, every major candidate for US President, and more than 40% of top global religious leaders are on Twitter.
4. 10% of people younger than 25 years old respond to social media and text messages during sex.
5. In July 2012 Americans spent 74.0 billion minutes on social media via a home computer, 40.8 billion minutes via apps, and 5.7 billion minutes via mobile web browsers, a total of 121.1 billion minutes on social networking sites.

ProCon.org. (2013, April 19). Social Networking ProCon.org. Retrieved from http://socialnetworking.procon.org/

I was surprised by the second one since I am that type of student who use networking sites while studying! 

Measure the Impact of Social Media Marketing

Since social media is now the business trend for marketing and lots of companies are adopting this strategy. Here comes another question, how do you measure the effect or even ROI (Return on Investment) of social media marketing? Does social media really as effective as we imagine it could be?

As you can think of, simply counting the “likes” and “followers” is not the best way of measuring the effectiveness of social media and might neglect the real impact of social media. When measuring the impact, there are few questions should be answered first:

Who is measuring?
People that play different roles in the companies will have different perspectives when measuring the impact of social media, and will also affect their objectives of using it, and that will bring us to the next question.

What are the objectives?
The objectives of your marketing plan will shape your strategy and the results will reflect in different ways.

If divide by different roles and objectives.

Social media manager

The objectives of the social media managers might be “how attractive is our page?” “Do people like our posts or campaign?” To know the answers, they can use fans, likes, follower or members as indicators. Also, reviewing how many comments and posts on the webpage will be helpful. They have to pay attention to the emotional reactions of the viewers.

Marketing managers and supervisors

The marketing managers and supervisors place more emphasis on a broader perspective. Managers can use survey to know if their brand awareness is increasing, are people more willing to buy company’s product. Or to see if there’s potential customers been discovered.

General Managers

For the high level managers such as CEOs and CFOs, their ultimate goal of using social media as marketing tool is to MAKE MORE MONEY. They can review the financial indicators, such as revenue and sales volume, compare these indicators before and after adopting social media to find out if there is a correlation between sales and using social media for marketing. It might be a bit difficult to really find out the “ROI” of social media, here’s some tips to start measuring.

At the beginning of research I thought it is very difficult to measure the impact of using social media as marketing tool, since the it is so easy to get online and simply hit like but not buying anything from the company. However, once we breakdown by the roles and objectives, you can easily see that, the objective is not only from financial perspectives, but also other intangible goals.

What Is Happening Now?

What is social media?

“Social media refers to the means of interactions among people in which they create, share, and exchange information and ideas in virtual communities and networks.” (Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media)

Social Media including blogs, microblogs(twitters), social network sites (facebook), podcasts, photographs or pictures, video, etc. The growing population that are using these social media to exchange their personal or interpersonal thoughts and ideas had made social media a power in our society that cannot be ignore. Moreover, the technologies had applied to mobile device, making the velocity higher. In other words, the speed of changing information has increased.

Social Media applied in business

Companies had long discovered the power of social media and used these media to reach out to their customers. Companies use social media to increase brand awareness and promote the new product. Besides from simply put an advertisement on social media, company could also create an official website or facebook page of the new launch product, hire some people to write their experience of using the product, these review can attract people that are interested in the product, and generate an discussion about the product. This is a typical, but not the only, model of using social media. Companies can tie different kinds of social media together, customers can see the traditional TV ads and find more information about the product on the facebook or youtube pages

Why using Social Media?

Low Cost

Before social media, the best way of let your customers to know your product is through traditional ads on TV or newspaper, which is very expensive and hard to track your customers. Social media created an equal opportunity for every company, as long as you have internet access. Even small company with limited budget can go online and set up a webpage, and start to do the promotion on it.

User Generate Content

Customers used to be “consumers of the content”, which means we used to receive the massage from companies passively. Social media has change the model to a “user generate content”, customers now create the content by themselves, it is the customers who made the product more desirable and famous among people.

Words of Mouth

“Do you know there is a new restaurant in town?”

Words of mouth as long been a powerful way of advertisement, people like to hear other’s reviews after they tried new things, no matter it is good or bad.

 “Social media have brought the power of word-of-mouth to a large audience. That means your opinion can have great influence.” (Randi M. Solhaug. “Worthwhile Words-of-Mouth on Social Media”. 2012, October 9^th. http://sciencenordic.com/worthwhile-word-mouth-social-media)

 Companies are looking for more visitors and followers on their pages, and it is easier and more efficient to let the customers bring more customers by themselves. Moreover, since the social media is now the tool for spreading out the word, the speed became faster then ever before.

Social Media had changed massively in recent years. It create another way for companies to promote their product, to build their brand name, and to reach to more customers. The video below tells a lot of statistic data about social media in 2013, which could help us understand how powerful social media is, and how we all related to it.

MistMediaGroup. (2013, Feb 19th). "Social and Digital Media Revolution Statistics 2013". Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Slb5x5fixk4

Hello!

Greetings!

To the people who are also interested in the growing power of Social Media, let us start to learn things together! Following I will briefly describe what I plan to write about this blog, and the topics that will be covered.(hopefully)

This blog will be discussing how social media affect business world. I will first do some research about different types of current social media and how companies are using social media for marketing. Then I will discuss how social as a knowledge management tool affect companies internally. Finally, I would like to dig deeper to understand what is the impact of social media on advertisement, and how social media work as a collaborator in business world.

Before we start, I would like to throw out some questions I have now regarding to social media, and hope to find out the answers after a month later, when most part of this blog is done.

Q1: Can social media really help companies gain their revenue?

Q2: How do we measure the impact of social media?

Q3: Are there any downside of using social media as marketing tool?

Q4: What will be the next trend of social media?

Let the journey begin!