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Afew decades ago, television was the most exciting technological devel- opment, and it transformed society in an unprecedented manner. Today, we’re seeing a similar transformation
via the Internet and the rise of social media. In fact, social media is poised to transform society in an even more fundamental manner.
It is easy to underestimate the true disruptive potential of social media – a moving target which is hard to pin down due to constant innovation. For example, as a consequence of its widespread adop- tion, the distinction between the public and private spheres of life are quickly eroding. Whether one is a CEO, the President of a country, a member of the British Royalty, or a common person, everything about one is on social media – personal informa- tion, likes and dislikes, or other mundane activities. We are all a sh in a digital aquarium: everyone is curious about everything we do.
e focus of this paper is on the impact of social media on the future of marketing. Tradi- tional marketing communication, consisting of print, radio and television, is what can be called
a “shotgun” approach: it represents one to many, passive communication. In order to achieve e - ciency and e ectiveness, therefore, Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning strategies are utilized by the marketer. Social media, on the other hand, are interactive in nature – they represent peer to peer communication, or what is referred to as many to many, interactive communication. Additionally, since Word of Mouth (WOM) is so cru-
cial in marketing, I will also discuss how traditional WOM in uence will change dramatically in the world of social
media.
Social Media: Platforms and use
Social media is a blur of “likes,” “tweets, “shares”, “posts” and content (Bullas, 2014). Its use is not limited to
the youth; rather, it is universal and embedded in every corner of the web. e numbers are staggering: 72% of all inter- net users are now active on social media
social MeDia
(Bullas, 2014). 89% of people in the age bracket of 18 to 29 use social media; 82% of people between ages 30 to 49 are active on social media; 65% of 50 to 64-year-olds use social media, while in the 65+ years age bracket 49% are active users (Pew Research, 2014). It is clear that regardless of their age, people are now spending a lot of time on social media, con- stantly sharing and browsing information.
When it comes to geography, it is U.S. citizens that top the list of time spent on social media, at
16 minutes per hour spent on the Internet. Aus- tralians follow them at 14 minutes and the British at 13 minutes (Experian, 2013). e use of mobile technology to access social media is also increasing rapidly, with 71% of users accessing social media through mobile devices (Bullas, 2014).
Currently, Facebook is the “biggest kid” on the social media block, with 1.49 billion users (Statista, 2015) and more than 100,000 webpages accessed with the ‘Login with Facebook’ feature (La erty, 2014). 23% of Facebook users log in at least ve times a day (Romeri, 2014). Facebook also has a
lot of in uence on the buying decisions of custom- ers, as 47% of Americans say that Facebook is the number one in uencer of their purchasing habits (Romeri, 2014). Since Facebook has so much in u- ence on people, it isn’t surprising that 94% of B2C marketers and 82% of B2B marketers today use Facebook for customer acquisition (Stelzner, 2014).
fig. 1: the growth of social Media, by millions of users per platform. Data source: www.je bullas.com
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