Read & write

Social media marketing has become a necessity if you want to stay even or exceed the efforts of your competition. Our society literally functions tuned into social media each day, and if you are not there with them you and your business are being left behind. Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest are all being used to the hilt to promote products and services to the extent that these are the places that up and coming younger people are looking to find their products and services. It is estimated that the age group of 15 to 24 derives 95% of all their knowledge about the world in general and their desired products and services specifically from this source.

Print, radio and TV are still the huge marketing platforms in the advertising industry, but the demographics are changing rapidly. Since many people carry their smart phones with them everywhere they go, the competition for ad space on that platform is becoming more and more competitive each and every day.

What if you could focus your brand, or your company directly to the market of people who would readily give your product a serious look, if only they knew about you and where they could buy your product? Would that be valuable to your business? Of course it would, in a heartbeat! That is what social media can do. There are billions of people on the social media sites right now, and even though the marketing side of things is still in its infancy, things are heating up in a hurry.

If an idea or a product catches on with Facebook or Twitter, for example, a concept can go viral and have thousands of individuals view it in a matter of hours. Campaigns can now be planned around specific products and regions where people that are interested in certain concepts and ideas will respond depending upon their likes and dislikes, regional feelings, and the like. Identifying and locating specific individuals who think a certain way is a better method of selling something than throwing up a bunch of ads hoping that someone will see them and buy something. Even though most of the social media is designed for that purpose, being socially active, there is still a lot of room for marketing to those people.

Individuals will tend to mimic what their friends do as they derive credibility from their digital media friends and rely on that as being credible. Social media allows for marketers to reach thousands of people through the friends networks that never would be possible with other types of advertising methods. The process utilizes the power of relational influence for people to validate their opinions.

The old adage of, If it is good enough for Mary, it ought to be good enough for me, prevails in the thinking of people. Business should now be embracing the advantages of social media marketing and learning all about how to implementing it into their regular marketing budget. It is just in the beginning stages and during the next several years it will blow the lid off the top of the current concepts of marketing and advertising in general.