Social Media Marketing

There are many benefits in using social media for marketing. But I will go into the top three that I believe is the most important, and obvious benefits that can be taken advantage of. The first benefit for using social media like Facebook and Twitter, would be; increase brand recognition, create higher conversation rate, and increase brand loyalty.

First social media like Facebook it’s a great way to introduce your companies brand and gain increase brand recognition. With so many users on social media platforms this can create a big opportunity to share your brand and gain more awareness then it already has. By creating a visible place for customer can view your brand, this is important because it simultaneously makes you easier and more accessible for new customers, and makes you more familiar and recognizable for existing customers. For example, a frequent Twitter user could hear about your company for the first time only after stumbling upon it in a newsfeed. Or, an otherwise apathetic customer might become better acquainted with your brand after seeing your presence on multiple networks.

Next this will create higher conversation rate, what is important here is a company on social media has the opportunity to hear customer’s recommendations, and comments on anything. The key here like we learned in class is to interact with your customers and make sure they are heard. If done successfully this can increase conversation rates and this can all be positive. Negative feedback can also be good as a company can change their ways or offer other incentives to retain that customer. Every post you make on a social media platform is an opportunity for customers to convert. When you build a following, you’ll simultaneously have access to new customers, recent customers, and old customers, and you’ll be able to interact with all of them. Every blog post, image, video, or comment you share is a chance for someone to react, and every reaction could lead to a site visit, and eventually a conversion.

Lastly a brand/ company can get the chance to increase brand loyalty. As brushed up before in conversation rates, brands who engage on social media channels enjoy higher loyalty from their customers. The report concludes “Companies should take advantage of the tools social media gives them when it comes to connecting with their audience.”

“Mark Zuckerberg has said Facebook will do more to tackle the viral spread of false news on its network, and this week the company has started experimenting with a system to fix the problem: it’s asking its own users for help.”

According to an article and their 2015 research, says that millennials are the most stressed out generation in the U.S. Those aged 18 to 35 are reporting considerably higher stress levels than the average American, and today’s college students, who fit squarely within that age range, appear to be more stressed out than ever before. What research had to do to figure out why so many students (specifically college students) were so stressed, was they turned to twitter to figure this out. A Survey took to twitter to determine “the most significant sources of college students stresses,” by examining tweets “originating from four-year universities with 1,000 or more students and searched for keywords related to mental health and stress.” What they found was a lot of students were tweeting about exams and tests that had to be done. A lot of the stresses seem to be originating from school and the work that students have to do. Midterms and finals were the most significant causes of stress. Other stress came from choosing a career that interest them and what had the highest paying job. Students had a lot to worry about. Other tweets that were found that were tweeted frequently was the paying back of student loans, many students are found to be in debt after finishing school, this will just add on the stresses that they had before. To think about it, not all college experiences are created equal, and not all college students reported the same levels of stress. These stresses can vary from student to student, and other factors can affect a student, like for example, other tweets not related to school was the lack of sleep students were tweeting about.

Social media for the past decade has an incredible impact on different platforms like journalism, social commerce and even politics. Billions of people use social media to obtain information rather than other old sources like TV and Newspaper. “A recent research poll conducted by Pew found that 62% of Americans get their news from social media. It is estimated that 75% of Americans have social media apps on their mobile phones.” What was going on in the article is that since a mass population gets there news from social media like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, but the article goes on to tell us that you can’t tell what fact versus fiction. Social media does not tell us if the image, video, or blog is face. Now lawyers are looking at rules and guidelines to look into what could be misleading information or news. Layers have always fought for free press but now they want to look into the idea of regulating social media to make sure information is not misleading.

Augmented reality is becoming a new trend in 2016. When searching for examples of augmented reality we often think of movies like Iron Man. This movie features computers display that seem to take over whatever room they are in and allow users to sort through information with just a wave of their hand or a flick of their wrist. The idea of augmented reality to today is to combined virtual world with real life interactions. The best example of this is Pokémon GO. This was the take off for augmented reality. This game has players required to interact with reality in order to play. You will see people all over places playing with their phones trying to catch Pokémon. From what is explained in the article is that this game is a stepping stone for other augmented reality technology. Due to the popularity with millions of active player playing daily, Companies are paring-up like Nintendo partnering with Niantic to create Pokémon. Also, advancements in chips are being made that will help phones and tablets run AR programs with ease and the development of head-mounted displays, like PlayStation VR, will add to the AR market. Next Microsoft has invested over a billion in augmented technology to further this new idea into the entertainment field.

            I am very interested to see where this augmented reality will go in the future. Further reading tells me that you can use you mobile smart phone to scan the sounding area for anything you are interested in. for example if you were looking for a hotel to stay at in New York City you would open a app and look through your phone as if you were taking a video of your surroundings, and you would be able to see open rooms, that give you more detailed information, like pricing, directions, name of hotel, etc.. The Marketing industry would change as well with the new technology, by incorporating different advertisement in the augmented virtual world. This would be a new type of advertisement and promotion that viewers would interact with and see.

As of this morning, Donald Trump was elected as the 45th President of the United States of America. Upon Election Day Facebook has been seeing enormous amounts of activity in the past couple of weeks. Specifically November 8th alone had 115.3 million people on Facebook worldwide that generating 716.3 million likes posts comments, and shares related to the election. Facebook Live created and interaction to allow Facebook users to vote on their favorite candidate, Over 10 million people on Facebook shared their votes for everyone to see. Facebook pages for Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton became top election content that viewers clicked to and posted on. As for their running mates, Mike Pence had over 6.9 million people and over 24.4 million interactions and Tim Kaine had over 3.7 million people and over 11.9 million interactions.

Facebook Live generated lots of views (millions) starting from the first presidential debate, to the election. This allows Facebook to reach that passionate fan base while offering some uncensored comic relief ahead of the results. This opportunity gives an insight on how people are feeling and what their reactions are on content that is on Facebook Live.

“Chatbots are a conversational agent that is designed to simulate intelligent conversation without a human being present.”

In an era that uses a lot of sophisticated technology, it’s all about embedding human smarts in machines. So Facebook has created an application called Chatbots that is rapidly gaining in popularity. This is providing marketers with a new tool to leverage with. These Chatbots are the incorporation of automatic Chatbots within Facebook Messenger. A machine will have conversation with a user and offers flexibility in order to automate tasks, and assist in retrieving data. They are becoming a vital way to enhance the consumer experience for the purpose of better customer service and growing interaction. In April 2016, Mark Zuckerberg announced that third parties could use the messenger platform to create their own personal Chatbot. Since then, the popularity of Chatbots has rapidly grown all over the world. Their prime functionality remains the same, and that is to improve real-time engagement. Customers are always searching for prompt and ready replies to their comments so the Chatbots are capable of answering most of the queries placed by customers, without a human interfering.

The article that I read about, was how business are targeting all social media users. Businesses should be aware that not all countries use the same social media platforms. China for instence uses completely different social media platforms. If you wanted to friend someone from China, you will find that you can’t do this, because they use other social media platforms like QQ, Qzone, Wechat, RenRen, Momo and other popular social media platforms. As of 2015 china has blocked 3,000 websites from its mainland (excluding Hong Kong) due to a wide variety of laws and administrative regulations. So you won’t find anyone using Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and more.

The article goes on explaining how Chinese internet users use social media. Research shows US social media users like to connect with family and friends, and share videos and photos, and enjoy the platform as a means of entertainment. While Chinese people use it to connect with family and friends also but also use it to communicate with colleagues, follow news and interesting content, and learn and share knowledge. It seems China uses social media more as a form of knowledge rather than entertainment in the US. Knowing the main purpose of why people use social media can help a business target a specific audience more effectivly. This can prove usefull for a company  trying to communicate with it’s specific target auidence.

What I found was that of the 721,434,547 internet users in china 92.8 of them use some sort of social media platform. Of this: 31 % of users are company employees, 15.7 % are self-employed, and 13.7 % are professional workers. There is a large target market that businesses can find desirable for their company.