FEBRUARY 20189that Facebook and Twitter, both were made available to the people throughout the world. Today, there is a substantial variety of social networking sites available which can be linked to-gether, such that it helps people en-able cross-posting. This creates an environment where users can reach the maximum number of people without sacrificing the intimacy of a personal communication.Social media has become a rev-olutionary component of the aver-age individual's daily life. This real-ity continues to challenge the once dominant traditional media. There are various advantages of social media marketing over traditional marketing in terms of cost, reach, engagement etc. Let us go through each factor to understand the same in detail.Cost: Social Media Marketing is cheaper than any form of marketing available today. In terms of social media, the most valued platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and In-stagram, are all completely free to establish a public profile. Facebook has a low cost of advertising which also offers the opportunity to dis-tribute advertisements to the de-sired segment or the target audi-ence.Evaluation Metrics: Traditional marketing, however, fails to provide the accurate methods for evaluating the success or performance of any set campaign. Whereas, the social media campaign results are mea-surable, and marketers can take im-mediate action to spot trends and re-align campaigns.Reach: With over 2 billion peo-ple using social media platforms, the community regarded is highly active and highly responsive to the campaigns. Also, social media pro-vides a method to choose the target audience that results in delivering the right message to the right per-son. Whereas, traditional marketing is presented to the public in general and however, results in lower re-turns.Engagement: Unlike tradition-al media, social media offers the marketing platform that allows you to engage and interact with your consumers ­ by creating a two-way relationship, which can be hugely lucrative for brands.However, we can summarize that the future of marketing is moving from traditional mediums to digital ones rapidly for a simple yet essen-tial reason as it offers the flexibility to create, optimize and promote the content on multiple platforms such as mobile, desktop and personal computers. Social Media Marketing has emerged as a more economical and powerful medium of brand pro-motion. Considering the present trends, what to expect from the coming years itself is a question. However, a few predicted trends that we can expect to observe in the coming years are:1. A Video through which the content will be marketed to the public.2. Increase use of Voice Search might bring up some fire in social media too.3. The Chatbot Army is set to up-take in the coming years4. Influencer marketing will yet, continues to grow.5. Increasing levels of Real-Time Marketing will be observed.The complexity of modern mar-keting is only going to keep increas-ing and if you look at how technol-ogy has moved through marketing, it has continued to move closer and closer to the actual planning and development of marketing it-self. And it's not much later that we would see technology complete this transition and become a part of the core fabric of marketing itself. Nikul PatelSocial Media Marketing is a form of internet marketing that targets social media networks and applications to spread brand awareness or to gain traffic through such channels
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