Social media and marketing

Hello everyone! This is my first blog here and I would like to share my opinion on social media and its impact to marketing business.

Newspaper, television or even radio channels were normally the media companies would make use of to advertise their products or services in the last century. People could choose and buy their commodities simply because they found the ads looked attractive to them. However, with the popularity of Internet usage, the effectiveness of the ads in traditional media is fading. Instead, marketing on social media quickly evolves and becomes a main stream of the industry. Social media used in marketing, as well as the marketing method will be further discussed below.

With the rapid development of mobile Internet access, it is now not rare to witness your neighbours browsing facebook, replying a tweet in Twitter or watching a video clip in Youtube during a bus journey, and I believe you must have been one of them sometimes. In fact, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube are among the most popular social media being used today. In view of this, companies would usually employ them as marketing channels (e.g. creating a facebook page, setting up a twitter account or recording a video and put it on Youtube) to promote their brands and products.

Starbucks Facebook page. They can promote their new beverages there.

Learnt from the lessons, there are several strategies to perform social media marketing like Reviews, Direct Social Recommendations, Derived Social Recommedations and so on. It is a little surprise to me that many websites which I often visit are actually using the strategies mentioned above. I will show some of them here and illustrate the methods they have used.

Hotels reviews and rating page in price.com.hk

 A restaurant reviews and rating page in openrice.com

These are the examples of websites using the strategy ‘Reviews’. By viewing the comments made by others, people can have a basic idea about the products/services before making a decision to buy them. It is extremely useful for booking hotels and restaurants and all other services, unlike purchasing an electronic product that people cannot have trials before really paying for their own experience. They would like to make sure the services they are going to receive worth the money they pay. Reviews acts as important references to them as they value opinions from peers. If the reviews enclosed photos with detailed comments, they will be of higher reference worth since the actuality is presented vividly in our eyes.

Share buttons in the top right corner for people to post this restaurant review on their facebooks

The website utilized the marketing strategy ‘Direct Social Recommendations’, which expresses emphasis on direct relationships to promote and recommend products and services. For instant, you may see that we can share our review of a restaurant directly in the website. By doing this, my friends are able to notice this restaurant in their Facebook newsfeed but not people who do not know me. 

Email to friends in order to earn points in groupon.hk

'Like' in Facebook to participate in a marketing event

Besides, this strategy are also formalized and packaged as marketing functions and campaigns of companies to promote their brands or products. Two common practices are: Email to friends and ‘Like’ in Facebook. Email to friends is to place a button or option for users to invite their friends to the current website or to become a member of it. In the first picture, you can see that it is encouraged by offering purchasing points once you successfully invite friends to become a registered user. The next picture is about a promotion campaign which requires participants to ‘Like’ in Facebook before answering the question. As our ‘Like’ activity would be shown in newsfeeds of our friends, this leads to a marketing effect with low cost.

Recommendation of hotels of Singapore in tripadvisor.com

Recommendation of jersey in ensport.com

Here shows two different examples of ‘Derived Social Recommendations’, which bases on statistic analysis to produce recommendations and offer to users. Benefited from the lessons, we are able to distinguish that the first one used user-based filtering to suggest hotels in Singapore while the second one offered another jersey based on item-based filtering methodology. To explain, user-based filtering will look for users who have similar interests, share the same rating patterns or come from the same regions and will make use of the feedbacks and ratings from those seemingly like-minded users to compute predictions and suggest to the current users. On the contrary, item-based filtering will create a database to analyze item-with-item relationships between different pairs of items by historical data and maybe even cookies, and extrapolate the possible items the user would be interested.

We have not yet covered all the marketing strategies that companies can make use of, but the above passages should have given you an insight about how social media is permeating into our lives. Companies which can properly employed social media marketing would undoubtedly be beneficial because they no longer require spending huge amount of money in advertising on newspaper and television. Creating facebook page and twitter, which would have much lower development and maintenance cost, could replace their function and may even have a more significant impact than the old approaches due to the popularity of the mobile internet access.

Of course, a coin always has two sides. Inappropriate social media marketing would cause negative influence to a company. In my opinion, the derived social recommendations are inconvenient because what they suggest is seldom the thing I look for. Same as direct social recommendations, they may hinder people from what they want, and cause annoyance for someone having limited time or in hurry. Besides, it is also known that there are companies hiring people to write reviews and give high ratings in websites, which makes the ‘Review’ strategy not as reliable as we first thought. These will all cause negative impact to the companies when users have bad experience of them since they can quickly share to their peers. Besides, to benefit from reviews of others, we can filter reviews by focusing on those who are made by people with more posts and go in deep of their reviews to differentiate if their wordings and descriptions are likely reflecting the truth. By doing this, I believe we can enjoy the advantages brought by social media marketing in many areas!