One can easily say without any
doubt that social networks and social media have been one the biggest
technological revolution of this century, if not the biggest. Not only they
have reformed people’s personal and social lives but these networks have become
one of the major platforms for companies to help grow their businesses.
Up until a few years back,
businesses used the conventional ways of marketing to sell their products.
These techniques included various types of advertisements through newspaper and
television. However, lately, the trend of reading papers and even watching
conventional TV channels is diminishing mainly because all these things are now
conveniently available to people via the internet. Recently, I came across this
survey article by business insider comparing the time people spent on watching
television VS using the internet. The survey showed that over the years, the
average time people are spending on the internet in increasing whereas the time
people are spending on TV is decreasing. For example, in 2009, average time on
TV was 188 minutes per days and on the internet, it was 48 minutes per day
whereas in 2017, internet time raised up to go to almost 149 minutes per day
and time for TV per day was decreased to 167 minutes per day. One can
conveniently say from these statistics that soon watching television would
become very uncommon.
Now, in view of all this
situation, pretty much all big and small companies have made their presence
known on these networks. If we take facts and figures into consideration, out
of around 7.5 billion people on earth, nearly 2.5 billion people are on social
networks. So naturally, It’s has become the need of hour considering around
one-third of the population of the world uses these platforms now.
I should rather introduce the
term ‘social media marketing’ here before moving any further. According to the
Wikipedia definition, Social media marketing is the use of social media
platforms and websites to promote a product or service. You might have seen ads
popping up when you open a website or when you try to play a YouTube video. All
these types of advertisements come under the umbrella of social media marketing
and it is one of the growing industry in the world at the moment.
Social media marketing has
leverage over the conventional marketing in a number of ways. Firstly, with
social networks, brands can directly connect to their most loyal customers.
They can easily interact with their customers with direct conversations which
increases customer satisfaction. Secondly, you can increase the brand’s
recognition with more and more effort you put into marketing your products and
services and now, with a number of platforms available, businesses can have
even better recognition if they have more platforms to approach people.
Concluding the discussion, I
should rather make this statement that if anyone wants to survive and make a
profitable business in today’s world, they should definitely boost their
presence on the internet and specifically on social networks because this is
what the present and future of advertisement are.