Social Media and Business Development

“ A large social-media presence is important because it's one of the last ways to conduct cost-effective marketing. Everything else involves buying eyeballs and ears. Social media enables a small business to earn eyeballs and ears.” said Guy Kawasaki, an American businessman. Social media influence is an advertising term that expresses the capability of one person to affect others’ thoughts in a digital society. The more impact a person has, the more people are interested in businesses or others who want to support a concept or trade goods (Rouse, 2019). Since social media was widely established in the internet age, it plays a principal role in the business world as it has provided a number of ways to boost their business for companies, including other people. Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook are the social media sites that individuals typically use to socialize online (Attri, 2016).

From my perspective, I strongly agree that having social media is one of the factors that make businesses successful, so this research paper will illustrate some benefits and downsides, and how social network sites can enhance the business world than ever before. Since now people live on the earth that news are reported on TV news channel after Twitter, utilizing public networking sites obviously works for all businesses in many terms of aspects, for instance, it can be used to advertise or sell things without losing any money as well as time to set up the store. Also, it reinforces the total income for the retails, especially in small enterprises. Social media marketing has increased 133 percent of business retailers revenues (Bowden, 2014). This implies that retailers, currently, would be able to gain much more income due to the market's growth. There are various methods that companies choose to obtain attendance from social network users. The primary way is to build awareness for customers because online networks offer opportunities to marketers in order to widen their businesses’ visibility. In other words, if they already know or see the company earlier, they are more likely to purchase stuff. Plus, providing after-sales support and assistance to buyers would be the next step.

To elaborate, by having social media, such as Facebook, can diminish the wall between the firms and their clients as they are able to track on what customers comments or critiques and assist them immediately. Eventually, the word of mouth advertising is the last vigorous step. If the products and their supports are satisfied, it is common for individuals to suggest others. According to Jeff Epstein (2013), the founder and CEO of Ambassador Software, said 71% of consumers who have had a good social media service experience with a brand are likely to recommend it to others (as cited in Hainla, 2019). This means that the companies just do nothing but wait for a massive amount of profits from this process. The recent study has found that sales and discounts can trigger transactions by prompt pay; however, social value is heightened by inspiration and entertainment. According to the 2018 Sprout Social Index report, “Two-thirds of consumers said they will engage with social posts that are entertaining, while only 37% said the same about posts that included discounts or sales” (as cited in Forte, 2019). This shows that although the low price seems attractive, the demand of people still more depends on what they are interested in. Figure 1. These bar charts illustrate the social media marketing use rate in the United States from 2013 to 2019 (Statista, 2019).

As can be seen from the graph, the use of marketing via social media has been gradually increasing from 2013 to 2019 at 86.2 and 91 percent respectively. Before the digital world had begun, broadcast TV and newspapers were the place where the retailers posted for advertising. Moreover, the most operating platform that is being used for SMBs marketing is Facebook which has approximately 45 percent of all the market. There are some successful corporations that advertising their campaign via social media applications, such as Domino’s pizza and Airbnb. One conspicuous example company is Uber, a ridesharing enterprise, it services peer to peer rideshare and food delivery with an affordable price for customers. Its advertisements usually come up on the feed of social media applications, such as Facebook and its objectives are to raise the site trafficking by posting creative posts with discounts depending on time usage in order to gain insight into customers’ minds everyday (Pratap, 2018). Furthermore, 22% is the engagement rate that uber receives from Facebook page even though its activities are only 5 posts per week (Baez, 2017). Because of this, it obtains millions of people to download the application and use it. Not only start-up firms can enhance their revenue, but also the famous companies that utilize social media to promote new advertisements, such as Nike. In 2012, they revealed the campaign called #makeitcount which was about film promoting an athletic performance monitoring app, Fuelband, which costs $149.

Casey Neistat and Max Joseph, the producers, decided to take all the budget that Nike gave to travel for 10 days, 3 continents, 16 countries and record their daily blog. Their aim was trying to know the real meaning of count and to get better and become active on Twitter and Facebook, to join the online world that a large number of people have the same desires. Also, they sponsored athletes in the 2012 Olympics by using this campaign which went viral and later received 57,000 more followers (socialmediasuccesses, 2013). This outstanding incident shows the accomplishment of using social media in order to boost businesses.

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