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Marketers cannot ignore the social media buzz

By Binu Paul, SiliconIndia | Wednesday, 02 March 2011, 17:30 Hrs

Marketers cannot ignore the social media buzz

Bangalore: The mantra of new age marketing is customer centricity. With traditional marketing failing to generate adequate return on investment and people's trust on advertisements fading gradually, marketers are looking up to social media which is continuously evolving and offers great potential for new age marketing. Social media plays a vital role in new age marketing as it has become a medium of an integrated and strategic business communications, service, and information community.

The new age marketing has gone to a different level as social media marketers have gained adequate experience and have advanced to a state of achieving the social marketing objectives and proving Return of Investment (ROI). Social media marketing takes a more human centric approach and it is becoming popular and expanding to majority of the social media avenues in a fast rhythm with more and more corporations and business undertakings experimenting this and adding it to their marketing mix.

Social networking and social media marketing are closely connected. The number of Twitter following, the amount of content shared on Facebook and the likes, the number of hits on YouTube videos, and the number of Blogs shared are the evidence of social media becoming an untamable giant in social media marketing. The social network and its increasing communication on the cloud cover a whole lot of information on all kinds of subjects, businesses, products, services, sciences and everything else.

Instead of systematically narrowing their choices from a big list, today's consumers take a much more iterative and less reductive journey. They often reduce the number of products they consider at the outset. Rather than relaying on the media ads, they would seek the opinion of their peers or look up for reviews on the web. Recent surveys reveal that 90 percent of consumers trust peer recommendations when buying a product or service and 70 percent believe in the online recommendations than advertisements. The first thing when a normal consumer does when he hears about a new product or service is to research on the web for recommendations. Hence, it is highly suicidal for marketers to ignore the importance of social media marketing.

Social media marketing is all about content and the thumb rule here is 'selling without selling'. Creating a social authority on the web is absolutely necessary as it is found that over 25 percent of search results returned for 'Top 20 Brands' point to user generated contents. It would be in such a way that people would believe and follow what the marketer is saying or endorsing.

With the unlimited technological opportunities the social media provides, it is advisable for the marketers to create a platform to present their products as well as talk to their customers. Customer interaction has the potential to take the brand name to higher levels. With the social media platforms, the customers can be alerted on the release of new products and popularize the product in a short period of time.

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