Impact of Social Media Marketing on Society

The pace of change in business industry and consumerism is accelerating exponentially. This is due to social-media for making it possible. Mobile or smartphone technology has played a vital role in shaping the impact of social media. This helps the business and consumers to connect anywhere at any time. Increased time spent on social media has grown the interest of other mainstream media platforms. As, the mainstream media have grown its interest in social media. Bits of Information on social media grown an interest in news, therefore, journalists looking for a new top story or news use social media, as all the events break first on social media. The content being created and used and through social media has transformed the reliability of social media platforms. Evolving means of tactics used by the social-media to use collected data from consumers and sharing them with other marketing or business companies. In this paper, I consider that social media platforms do not address the issues based on marketing tactics, so they should put their effort and time to obtain trust from the social media users.

Regardless of the potential and remarkable accomplishments of social media. Lack of transparency of data on social media rises a lot of questions and doubts as it has always been a concern in the importance of reliable and valid social media platforms. Business and marketing companies do not contact the customers solely through one platform but use other platforms. These companies have no interest in literally using social media as means to business, instead, they acquire data from the users that gives them insights to stimulate demands that offers a targeted advertisement. Even though social media platforms use data collection, the metrics data collected by these social media platforms is doubtful in terms of its quality and reliability. Social media metrics uses different arithmetic aggregators to collect, process and update the data which results in different data reports and influence different issues related to it. Pew research shows “that more than 92% of 13-17-year-old in the US are reported online daily.” This overwhelming result is the evidence of the number of children being exposed to the social media platforms daily. Dunlop explains how in digital era most of the youth is online, which brings forth both challenges and opportunities for their health and well-being. It is easy for the companies selling good or bad products to reach the youngsters via online platform especially social media This leads us to the issue of promotion of unhealthy products, addiction to game etc. towards the students, who should be focusing on their studies. Online game players, mainly school going students are driven with a sense of competition among each other, which leads them to pursue in being better than the other or being the best player among all. This not only gives them the sense of joy but also creates fame and encouragement from gamer society.

Social media platforms do not provide a clear strategy, which results in reduced benefits for business. But successfully employ social media in a marketing campaign, need to invest substantial amounts of time over a long period to see useful results. This takes a high level of commitment, which ultimately costs significant amounts of money. With social media the rules are constantly changing – from the algorithm used “by Facebook to pick which of your posts to display, to the length of tweets, to the user interface in LinkedIn. It can easily become a full-time job just to keep up with the latest trends and current best practice.” Other forms of marketing, allow businesses to tightly control the message and its distribution, making sure that only that message is communicated and nothing else. Social media, but, is like a wild jungle. Once you release your message you also abandon control as it is shared, commented upon and added to. Business can face unwanted or inappropriate behavior on their profiles and sites can face bullying and harassment. “Risks can include negative feedback, information leaks or hacking.”

Youth has an exposure to the promotion and marketing to categories of unhealthy products such as energy dense and nutrient poor food and beverages, alcohol and tobacco. Social media platforms are proving to be an ideal medium for food and beverage companies to engage with young people. A US market research survey found that “63% of 13-32-year-olds have posted a photo on social media of unhealthy food or drinks they or someone else was consuming.” growing market of online games, such as games on Facebook, where people spend thousands.

Even though there may be a wealth of data available, it can be surprisingly difficult to measure the Return on Investment (ROI) of your social media efforts. This is because most of the data only really shows you how popular you are, “not how effective your posts are at getting the message across or whether that message is being retained and acted upon by your target audience.”

On the contrary, Social media has an easy and instant communication and gives real-time news and information discovery, great opportunities for business owners. For instance, an online survey on twitter with 251 participants with self-reported food hypersensitive participated to experiment the impact of a tweet. Which resulted in a positive impact, led to sharing of tweet to create awareness, many parents with food hypersensitive children also joined the cause. Offer pop, an online marketing company claims that, they help companies like amazon, sears, Walmart run social marketing campaigns, and claim to have “more than 40% increase in the social media campaign by its clients for a black Friday weekend.” It is tough to track the amount social-media benefits retailers in terms of sales. According to the Erin Robbins, head of intelligence at viral heat. “most of the retailers we’ve worked with have all agreed that people talking about their particular brand is always going to be better than not”. Social platforms are also used by celebrities and artists, who have thousands and millions of followers on platforms like Instagram, Facebook etc. This has also led to improving the health among the male and female users who admire these celebrity models, actors and singers, who stay fit and healthy, this influences them live a healthy lifestyle.

To conclude, new studies have opened doors to study, indicate and research the outcomes of usage of social-media-marketing by users and businesses, therefore, improve the user experience by filtrate red and transparent content, which must be provided in order to gain the trust from the users and better marketing strategies must be provided to businesses. The data collection and limitation to the knowledge of marketing tactics should be explained and users must be made aware of them. Every user is different, most have problems with data being stolen some may not, therefore, users must be given an option to whether they want to share their information or not. All things considered. The data collection and limitation to the knowledge of marketing tactics should be explained and make users aware of them. Social media platforms should address the issues based on marketing tactics, so they should put their effort and time to obtain trust from the social media users.  

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