Importance of Social Media in Marketing

This article discusses the importance of social media in marketing and how it can be utilized for marketing. It also provides a list of social media tools that can be used for social media marketing.

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IMPORTANCE OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN MARKETING
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1IMPORTANCE OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN MARKETING
The effectiveness of social media in reaching out to the target audience
Considering the presence of billions of people in the various social media sites, it can be
said that the social media can prove to be beneficial for promoting business interests. Social
media platforms are instrumental in building up social relationships. People can share their
activities, interests or other connection with the help of this medium. In the recent times, social
media has emerged as an essential strategic tool for marketing. Utilizing social media sites for
enhancing the visibility of the products, gaining customers, building social networks and for
showcasing the services and products can be immensely helpful for any emerging business
(Stelzner, 2014). Social media platforms provide the consumers with the opportunity to learn
about the services and products of a particular company as all the updated information related to
the organization is provided in the social media sites. Other than this, most of the business
profiles as well as the activities in the social media sites can be accessible by the search engines,
thus giving the customers much easier access to the information. Moreover, social sites provide
the consumers with the option of reviewing the products and services which are again made
public. Consumers find these reviews more trustworthy, thus giving the customers a sense of
satisfaction before opting for the services. The publicity that the Facebook, Twitter and other
social media platforms provide can be helpful for a business organization in reaching out to more
number of audiences. In the present technological era, Electronic Word of Mouth (EWOM) is
viewed as an immensely useful marketing strategy as this has the ability to reach out to more
number of audiences (Constantinides, 2014).

2IMPORTANCE OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN MARKETING
How social media can be utilized for marketing
In order to start with social media marketing, it is essential to identify the target customers. In
spite of having a potential product or service, the company might run at a loss if its content
information is not available to their target customers. Research regarding the demographics of
the active users of social media should be done. The next aspect of social media marketing is
determining the size of the audience. Content creation, marketing of search engine and
advertisements are some of the strategies of social media marketing that can engage their target
audiences. The other strategy that could be adopted is narrowing the audience with the help of a
similar page of the competitor. For example, if KFC points out to SubWay, Dominos and
MacDonalds, they can reach out to the audiences who are interested in these food chains.
Launching campaigns on social media can also be instrumental in gaining more number of
customers. One such example is the shot on iPhone campaign launched by Apple Inc. for
marketing its newly launched iPhone 7s (Vinerean et al., 2013). The campaign took the internet
by storm. Apart from this utilizing social media for providing Facebook offers, connecting with
the email subscribers, creation of LinkedIn profile can be useful in expanding the customer base.
Social media tools
The following are the list of some of the suggested social media tools that can be utilized
for the purpose of social media marketing:
 Quill Engage- This tool will connect to the Google analytics account and will provide the
marketer with detailed information regarding the traffic update of the site. The Quill
Engage report will help the marketer to get a clear picture regarding which post have
increased the traffic, which post was list viewed (Ashley and Tuten, 2015).

3IMPORTANCE OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN MARKETING
 Post planner- This is an inbuilt app on the Facebook that will help the marketer to well
plan his/her marketing strategy on Facebook. This tool provides the marketer with unique
ideas regarding the status update, contents that might get trending on Facebook.
 GitHub- This tool is of utmost importance for the purpose of social media marketing. The
tool is mainly a platform for development and a control system (Tiago and Veríssimo,
2014). It provides the developers with the necessary source codes who intend to share
their projects. The essential aspect of this tool is its sharing feature.
 Inkybee- This tool is used for researching about the blogger and the content creators
(Tuten and Solomon, 2017). It is important for a business to reach out the audiences. The
bloggers and the target audiences are potential customers for any business. Bloggers with
their contents can create brand awareness and can enhance the traffic of the page. This
can possibly enhance the SEO ranking of the page.

4IMPORTANCE OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN MARKETING
References
Ashley, C. and Tuten, T., 2015. Creative strategies in social media marketing: An exploratory
study of branded social content and consumer engagement. Psychology & Marketing, 32(1),
pp.15-27.
Constantinides, E., 2014. Foundations of social media marketing. Procedia-Social and
behavioral sciences, 148, pp.40-57.
Stelzner, M., 2014. 2014 Social Media Marketing Industry Report. Social media examiner, pp.1-
52.
Tiago, M.T.P.M.B. and Veríssimo, J.M.C., 2014. Digital marketing and social media: Why
bother?. Business Horizons, 57(6), pp.703-708.
Tuten, T.L. and Solomon, M.R., 2017. Social media marketing. Sage.
Vinerean, S., Cetina, I., Dumitrescu, L. and Tichindelean, M., 2013. The effects of social media
marketing on online consumer behavior. International Journal of Business and
Management, 8(14), p.66.