Analysis of Social Media Influences in Modern Marketing Practices

This report delves into the increasing significance of social media influences in modern marketing, examining how businesses of all sizes are leveraging these platforms to connect with customers, promote their brands, and boost sales. The report begins by defining marketing and highlighting the advantages of social media marketing, such as cost-effectiveness and enhanced user engagement. It then explores various strategies employed by businesses, including creating engaging profiles, broadcasting live video streams, utilizing social media influencers (celebrities, macro-influencers, and micro-influencers), and adopting a soft-selling approach. Several real-world examples, like Mini Mioche and Supplement King, are used to illustrate these techniques. The report also addresses why some businesses are yet to fully embrace social media marketing, citing factors like lack of understanding and concerns about resources. The conclusion emphasizes the importance of integrating social media into marketing strategies for long-term business success in the competitive market.

Running head: USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA INFLUENCES FOR MARKETING
Use of Social Media Influences for Marketing
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1USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA INFLUENCES FOR MARKETING
Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................1
Discussion..................................................................................................................................1
Advantages of Social media marketing..................................................................................1
Ways Businesses use Social Media Influences......................................................................2
 Creating profiles of multiple social media platforms..................................................2
 Broadcasting Live Video Streams on social media platforms.....................................2
 Social Media Influencers.............................................................................................3
 Soft selling approach...................................................................................................4
Why some business yet to appreciate social media as a marketing tool................................4
Conclusion..................................................................................................................................5
References:.................................................................................................................................6

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Introduction
The importance of social media for all sized business is rapidly growing at a warp
speed (Alalwan et al., 2017). With more numbers of people joining social media platforms
every single day and using them on a regular and frequent basis, the social media industry is
becoming bigger in size and is likely to keep in increasing in the coming years. As the wave
of social media is not going to end anytime soon, more and more businesses are taking the
advantage of it for surviving in the current market scenario. There are many small businesses
today who have had changed their operational strategies just to adapt social media. It is
affecting businesses, be it small or big, in many different ways. It is to note that the term
“social media influences” has seen a steep increase in its popularity in recent years. This
paper shall elaborate on presenting a discussion on how the businesses make use of social
media influences for marketing.
Discussion
Advantages of Social media marketing
The term “marketing” can be defined as the process of creating value for the potential
customers and creating a profitable relationship with them (Baltes, 2015). The topic of impact
of social media influences on marketing is a topic of great importance in modern world.
Social media plays a very important role in marketing and can be a great way for promoting
business, engaging directly with the customers and boosting sales. Today, many businesses
make use of social media influences as they significantly affect the way in which customers
perceive a brand. It is often claimed that they boost the user engagement across different
channels for engaging the customers and delivering better Omni channel customer experience
(Melero, Sese & Verhoef, 2016). Furthermore, as opined by (), using social media platforms
such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter etc. can lower down the costs of marketing. It has given

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immense power and control to the users and large companies and other well-known brands.
The top business owners and executives have understood that social media could make or
break their business and for this reason they have taken the opportunity for building their
strong presence on different social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook for doing
business.
Ways Businesses use Social Media Influences
 Creating profiles of multiple social media platforms
Businesses choose different social platforms as per their goals and objectives. For many
businesses today, customers first encounter about them on the social media and therefore,
having an impressive social media profile is very important. A range of platforms are present
today including Facebook, Instagram and Youtube (Schwartz & Halegoua, 2015). As per the
recent day, there are about 4.38 billion or people on internet and 3.48 billion among them are
actively using the social media platforms and these numbers are increasing day by day. Also,
research studies demonstrate that the modern customers have a habit if spending minimum of
half an hour per day in different social media sites. Many businesses such as Mini Mioche,
Sports System, Molson Coors Canada, Supplement King, WestJet etc. are having online
presence and are doing marketing through social media platforms and are actually excelling
at it.
 Broadcasting Live Video Streams on social media platforms
Live streaming is a technology that makes the message of a business to reach more users
at a time (Xiao, Wang & Chan-Olmsted, 2018). It is a great method of marketing and is built
on the back of information technology that has diminishing costs, exponential market
penetration and accelerating performance. Just ten years ago, live streaming was a very viable
option for the early-adopters brands to make use of. They were able to get connected to their

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customers who were watching those videos through their desktop computers. Today, video
live streaming has become an important element for building brands (Tang, Venolia &
Inkpen, 2015). It is easier to arrange and more integrated. Audience can even connect through
their mobile phones or tablets that now offer them more media performance than the
desktops. Sports Systems, a Canadian company that installs and builds sports related
equipment use this strategy. It posts videos on YouTube and Facebook live and grow its sales
leads. Younger generation is the more engaging and interacting ones with their live streaming
and videos.
 Social Media Influencers
There are three types of social media influencers and they are celebrities, macro-
influencers and micro-influencers (Kay, Mulcahy & Parkinson, 2020). It is to mention that
celebrities are the politicians, public individuals or artists who have about 1 million of
followers and each of their posts get about 5percent of commitment. The impact of celebrities
stem from its brand and status. Secondly, the macro-influencers are the ones who have less
than 1 million of followers and they gain up to 10percent of commitment in their every post.
They generate their know-how within a particular category. Finally, it’s the micro-influencers
who are the people with at least 500 followers and they gain above 25percent of engagement
in majority of their posts (Kay, Mulcahy & Parkinson, 2020). They build real commitment
with the brand and they have special relationship with their audience. Businesses engage into
sponsorship or make them as brand ambassador for their brand or product or use guest blog
approach to work with these influencers for attracting the target audience. Mini Mioche, a
Toronto-based clothing retailer, targets the influencers for its marketing purpose. It has
doubled its sales to the U.S. customers by means of exploiting Instagram.

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 Soft selling approach
Soft-selling in the social media platforms are suitable for many marketers and businesses.
It is not a place for hard selling (Karjaluoto, Ulkuniemi & Mustonen, 2015). Unlike the other
mediums, businesses, which try to pitch their products and services blatanly are penalised
instead of getting rewarded. For this reason, businesses are being effective on social media by
soft selling their brands and getting customers to trust them in different ways. For instance,
Supplement King, a Canadian company has developed good relationship with the followers
by means of encouraging them to share their fitness goals, information and other valuable
advices on exercises and recipes on their profiles and this has helped the company in
showcasing the services and products subtly. In this way, businesses are becoming trusted
brands and are gaining customer loyalty along with their sales in social media.
Why some business yet to appreciate social media as a marketing tool
In this way, the modern marketers are using social media to its fullest. However, there
are still some businesses that miss the social media boat. Along with the lack of support from
different CEOs and concerns regarding the additional costs of resources and ties, there is still
a lack of understanding regarding social media. There are many entrepreneurs who are of
belief that the primary purpose of social media is to keep friends and family in tough and for
this reason, they prefer using traditional marketing methods (Oztamur & Karakadilar, 2014).
These entrepreneurs and marketers are yet to appreciate the advantages gained for their
businesses by engaging with the customers online and finding out what they need and want.
They are unaware of the easily accessible and available free tools and insights for helping in
tracking and analysing the followers and evaluating the success of the social media
campaigns in terms of sales and engagement.

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Conclusion
Hence, from the above analysis it is to conclude that social media is a key method of
marketing. It helps in ensuring direct engagement with the current customers and the
potential ones while being a great way for promoting business and boosting sales. With the
help of the social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, markets can
connect, learn, communicate and share information to the current and the potential customer
base. Millennials and Generation Y are the prolific users of these platforms and are also the
ones who have the main spending power in the coming years. In the modern competitive
world of business, making social media a key part of marketing strategy is a key to long-term
business success.

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References:
Alalwan, A. A., Rana, N. P., Dwivedi, Y. K., & Algharabat, R. (2017). Social media in
marketing: A review and analysis of the existing literature. Telematics and
Informatics, 34(7), 1177-1190.
Baltes, L. P. (2015). Content marketing-the fundamental tool of digital marketing. Bulletin of
the Transilvania University of Brasov. Economic Sciences. Series V, 8(2), 111.
Karjaluoto, H., Ulkuniemi, P., & Mustonen, N. (2015). The role of digital channels in
industrial marketing communications. Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing.
Kay, S., Mulcahy, R., & Parkinson, J. (2020). When less is more: the impact of macro and
micro social media influencers’ disclosure. Journal of Marketing Management, 1-31.
Melero, I., Sese, F. J., & Verhoef, P. C. (2016). Recasting the customer experience in today’s
omni-channel environment. Universia Business Review, (50), 18-37.
Öztamur, D., & Karakadılar, İ. S. (2014). Exploring the role of social media for SMEs: as a
new marketing strategy tool for the firm performance perspective. Procedia-Social
and behavioral sciences, 150, 511-520.
Schwartz, R., & Halegoua, G. R. (2015). The spatial self: Location-based identity
performance on social media. New media & society, 17(10), 1643-1660.
Tang, J. C., Venolia, G., & Inkpen, K. M. (2016, May). Meerkat and periscope: I stream, you
stream, apps stream for live streams. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on
Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 4770-4780).

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Xiao, M., Wang, R., & Chan-Olmsted, S. (2018). Factors affecting YouTube influencer
marketing credibility: a heuristic-systematic model. Journal of Media Business
Studies, 15(3), 188-213.