Gone are the days when companies used to print ten feet long advertisements and put it on roads and bill boards to pitch in more and more customers. It is the era of enhancing your business by advertising on social media handles. It is quite clear cut if we say wherever customers go, advertisements follow and it is no different for social media. The world is getting smaller and we are becoming global citizens and all this has been made possible by the power of social media.
“You want a video to go viral? Upload on YouTube. Want to make people jealous of your recent trip? Upload pictures on Instagram. Forgot your friend’s birthday? Search on Facebook. Want to rant about politics? Tweet on twitter.”
There are numerous ways in which social communication has helped us in one or the other way.
The main motive behind the introduction of social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn was to build a space where people could connect from all parts of the world, where they could share their insights, thoughts, pictures and much more. Soon after, the popularity of these platforms went up so high that it became a necessity rather than a leisure time to have a social media account. When a person says “Oh! I don’t have a Facebook and Insta account”, we go like “Whaaaaat??!! Really? OMG!”
Printing advertisements for newspaper, putting up bill boards was getting really expensive, time consuming and not much customers were turning up like they used to in earlier times. This was the time when companies saw this as an opportunity to shift from old media techniques to social media trends.
“According to new data from USC Annenberg, people spend about 23.6 hours on an average in a week on social media? It is almost a full day of being glued to your phone and laptops. The truth is that social media is dominated by customers. Brands and companies are heartily welcomed if they want to sell something”
However, the question arises which social media platform to target more and which one to target less? Well, this can be quite confusing because not every person is a potential customer and let’s admit it draining our resources on someone who is not going to turn out as a potential customer is just a waste of time and money. To answer the above question, let us consider the percentage of population using different social media platforms. A new Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults finds that the social media landscape in early 2018 is defined by a mix of long-standing trends and newly emerging narratives. YouTube is on top by scoring more than 73% of population, Facebook is the second one with 68% of population. Others in line are Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Twitter. Well, now we got an answer on why we are forced to see annoying ads before all the YouTube videos we watch, it can be as small as a five second ad or as long as a three-minute ad.
Coming to Facebook, often companies make this mistake of not properly advertising on Facebook because probably they think that Instagram and Twitter are widely installed and daily used among our young generation, although this might be true but what companies need to focus is that there might be people with no Instagram or Twitter or Snapchat account but they surely do have a Facebook account and this is the case with a lot of people.
When it comes to turning a person into a potential customer there are a number of ways to do so.
“What happens when you search, let’s say, ‘Trendy tops’ on Myntra? You might often see the same clothes appearing on your Facebook or Instagram. Or if you are reading something on google, ‘Trendy tops’ might start showing on the left and right hand side of your webpage.”
You feel as if someone is constantly keeping an eye on each and everything you do online. These are the strategies that are adopted in order to convert you into a potential customer. Let us look at some more.
“If you have left something in your cart without clicking ‘Proceed to buy’, within some minutes you might get a message which goes like ‘…….. is waiting in your cart, click to buy it. Or when you close the window in the middle of a purchase, you might get an email saying ‘Complete your purchase before it goes out of stock’. Or when you have not shopped from a particular app since a long period of time and, ding dong, you get a mail ‘Where have you been?’”
All these are continuously used by companies to climb the ladder of not a customer to potential to frequent to a regular customer.
We, as humans, are living in the world of social media, so our needs should also be brought to us by social media.
Almost every business area has been disrupted by the rise of social media but perhaps none has been more impacted than the world of advertising.
Refrences:
For 2019 survey data on social media and messaging app use, see “Share of U.S. adults using social media, including Facebook, is mostly unchanged since 2018.”
https://www.pewinternet.org/2018/03/01/social-media-use-in-2018/
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