During a visit to York شراء متابعين تيك توك in Toronto, in the framework of activity I participated in with MBA students in the Schulich School of Business Administration, I saw a phenomenon that focused for me what I had known beforehand: today’s young people live their lives, make their purchases, examine offers, and set their leisure time activities using the social networks. They almost all have Smartphones, primarily of the Blackberry, Samsung Galaxy, and iPhone brands.
The fact that they are always connected, always updated and updating statuses on Twitter, pictures on Flickr, updates on Facebook, clips on YouTube, and advertising information from everybody requires marketers to think anew about marketing tools and their impact on modern marketing.
Is this the end of traditional marketing? Are the traditional advertisement tools no longer relevant?
The buzz word in the business world of today is social media, but many still do not understand how social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, are supposed to contribute to the company’s bottom line. This article presents the possibilities of social media use and how it can influence every business, competition, and consumer behavior.
Social media are quick, immediate, and primarily popular and interesting. In many aspects, they have greater impact than traditional media. The role of traditional media (such as newspapers, television, and radio) is rapidly being replaced by the different types of social media. The control has shifted from established media to the users themselves, each of whom can now write for online newspapers (blogs), television channels (YouTube), radio stations (Podcasts), instant messaging (Twitter), and social networks (Facebook). The consumer himself creates the content that interests him.
Data published recently in the United States illustrate this revolution:
• 96% of the members of generation Y are connected to social networks.
• 1 of every 8 couples who were married last year in the United States met through social media.
• 75% of all companies use LinkedIn to recruit new workers.
• More than 80% of the Twitter users use their mobile devices.
What is their user experience? What does this say about consumer accessibility?
• The network is taking the place of email as the leading mode of communication of the young generation.
• On YouTube there are more than 100,000,000 clips.
• On Wikipedia there are more than 13 million entries, and the decisive majority of them are not in English.
The media is managed by the people themselves. There are more than 200 million blogs, and about one half are updated once a day. More than 30% address products, brands, and purchases!
A search for the twenty leading brands in the world will lead in almost half of the results to consumer-written content. Can the marketer control what is said? Does he know what is online?
Most people will prefer information that comes from other consumers. Only a few will believe the advertiser’s words when the alternative is another user’s independent experience.
What about the commercial businesses? The low cost, the mass distribution, the ease of use, and the speed of performance of new media platforms offer opportunities for companies of all sizes and types to reach a tremendous number of potential clients effectively. This is generally too expensive to accomplish using traditional media.
