Social Media Marketing (Term Paper Sample)

INTERNET TECHNOLOGY, MARKETING AND SECURITY
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1. Evaluate the reasons Social Media Marketing has become exceedingly popular among businesses of all sizes.
The internet and increased advances in Information Technology have had a huge impact on businesses. This is seen in terms of globalization, increased competition, the way people work and how people share information. Importantly, the internet has transformed the way people communicate. From communicating via telephone, fax or mail, the internet digitalized communication to email, making it faster and easier. In time, internet use matured to the growth of new media such as social media.
Solis (2007) describes social media as the "shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content." Social media is a set of tools which has promoted global unanimity through interaction, discussion and community, allowing people to build relationships while promptly sharing information. This is done on platforms such as blogs, social networking sites e.g. Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, social news sites e.g. Digg, video and music portals e.g YouTube, social bookmarking sites e.g. Delicious, Reddit, online forums and reviews e.g. Amazon, Yahoo Answers! among other social communication channels.
Li and Bernoff (2008) observed that sharing on social media resulted in a collective influence which made businesses to take notice and seek means to become part of it. The influence of social media to predict real-world outcomes has led to the development of social media marketing. According to Barefoot & Szabo (2010) social media marketing is "a process that empowers individuals to promote their websites, products, or services through online social channels and to communicate with and tap into a much larger community that may not have been available via traditional advertising channels." The high multitude of social media users and the frequency at which they use these sites has made it an increasingly popular avenue for businesses to carry out online marketing.
Social media marketing has also become popular among businesses of all sizes because social networks have a great impact on consumers’ purchasing decisions. Their unique attribute of amplifying word of mouth has made it possibly more important than advertising as an information source. For instance, a potential consumer will interact with friends online, research a product on Google, search for it on Twitter and read forums on the experiences of those who have used the product or service before they decide to purchase or not. Since this period of consideration for the consumer is extremely influenced by social media content, businesses today are spending time in listening and responding to consumers on social media platforms (Zarella, 2010). Hunt (2009) observes that active engagement with online communities creates interest in a company and also provides useful information. Brands which allow consumers to "friend" them i.e. through Facebook Fan Pages and communicate with them e.g. on Twitter or email newsletters build a trust relationship which benefits both consumers and companies.
Social media marketing allows companies to connect with their customers and conduct various marketing and communication tasks such as customer management, public relations, etc. Social media tools are mostly free and especially for small businesses provide an efficient platform for companies to respond to customer complaints than setting up a customer care call centre. Companies that have a social networking site on which many of its customers participate in, interactions among customers may help provide solutions to product or service deficiencies as they exchange information and learn from each other. It can also be a good source of new ideas thus saving company money on investing in research and development efforts. Businesses can take advantage of the low financial cost that social media provides to run successful social media marketing campaigns.
Social media marketing helps create brand awareness and foster customer loyalty (Weinberg, 2009). A company’s active participation in social media platforms positively influences its brand awareness. Additionally, nearly all companies are involved in social media and it is important for companies that want to stay ahead of their competition to have an online presence and capitalize on that in order to build relationships with their customers.
2. Analyze the advantages and disadvantages of Social Media marketing for business entrepreneurs
Social media marketing allows a business to build a large network of supporters in a short time; which is important for a business to continue growing. When a company’s products or services appeal to a group of followers, it is those supporters who will refer it to other people if they approve of it. Entrepreneurs who set up various pages and profiles on social media platforms create many opportunities for their brand to be seen by various audiences. Creating awareness is the major first step for new products and creating as many avenues as possible on social media for exposure facilitates a successful launch.
Social media marketing is affordable. Social media tools are largely free and easy to use compared to other promotional tools (Levinson & Gibson, 2010). Essentially, social media is an effective way of marketing new products or services by amplifying word of mouth, which a lot of people are likely to consider more credible than advertising. Positive reviews get people talking about a product and help generate traffic to a company’s website in an effort to know more about this product. Social media marketing is an inexpensive means of creating product and brand awareness and customer loyalty.
Social media marketing is able to reach thousands of people in different geographical regions and time zones in the shortest time and allows real-time interactivity between consumers and brands. With millions of users on social media, this widens the scope of reach of a company’s marketing efforts. From large multinational companies to small enterprises, social media marketing offers several benefits to a company’s success. Social media marketing employs creativity, community and fostering relationships to promote products and services which mark for lasting impressions and customer loyalty.
However, social media marketing has some disadvantages. For one, it is difficult to build community quickly. Significant amounts of time have to be invested in consistently participating and engaging with consumers in order to get a following. Gillin (2009) reiterates that unlike traditional marketing, realizing the results of social media marketing may take some time, even a few years in order to get best results.
Secondly, implementing social media marketing in companies is a challenge as many businesses do not set clearly defined objectives and strategies. Despite an interest in using social media, some entrepreneurs may lack training or confidence in how to use it to meet their goals. Lack of knowledge of how to use various social media platforms to promote their products leave many business owners at a disadvantage as they do not know where to start or what kind of message would appeal to target audiences or how to post it.
Third, social media marketing opens a company to the risk of negative comments which can result in bad publicity associated with a product. For instance, disgruntled customers may post negative comments on a company’s twitter account, which is public and cannot be removed. Such negative comments can go viral and may result in considerable harm to a business. For instance, Cheerios, a breakfast cereal brand recently released a commercial that went viral after consumers posted controversial comments on its YouTube video. The company was able to disable the comments section of the video which curbed the negative comments on that social media platform. In this case, due to the negative publicity several consumers expressed loyalty to the brand by posting on their Facebook account after the video went viral (Goyette, May 31, 2013).
3. Assess how Social Media Marketing is helping Pepsi gain more customer insight than it would have otherwise
Consumers are recognized for being a valuable and the largest source for getting direct and reliable market intelligence (Chien & Chen; Sigala, 2008). Understanding consumers is usually essential for launching new products. However, mere understanding of consumer needs is not enough for a successful product awareness and adoption. It is also necessary for consumers to be activated, participate and give useful feedback. Consumer involvement in a company’s product development ensures product acceptance and gives insight into the latent needs of consumers. Social media marketing is a useful tool as it goes beyond simply collecting and analyzing consumer knowledge, but allows companies to use online social communities to actively engage and interact with individual consumers or consumer communities in order to get new ideas or test new products (Rowley, Teahan & Leeming, 2007).
In 2010, PepsiCo launched an innovative social media campaign that invited consumers to interact and collaborate in coming up with community-building projects that the company would invest in. The Pepsi Refresh Project was a bold initiative that roused interest when PepsiCo chose to forego placing ads in the Superbowl telecast for the first time in 23 years, in order to invest over $20 million in the project (Zmuda, 2012). The Pepsi Refresh Project launched with a website where people gave suggestions to better their communities. The move to forego placing Superbowl ads to get involved in a social media cause created brand awareness...