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| Social media as a marketplace |
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| Aug 21, 2009 Published in ideas
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 Social media is already changing the rules of the marketplace. With widespread proliferation of social sites across different demographic and psychographic segments, marketers and advertisers are constantly trying to reach the all-powerful group within these networks to promote and sell their products and services.
Social media is changing media consumption patterns. Consumers want a steady supply of fresh content, as well as the ability to participate in content creation. They also want to be able to subscribe to RSS feeds so information comes to them, instead of having to search for it.
New communication avenues for marketers
This has opened up new communication avenues for marketers. From basic strategies like placing ads where online crowds converge, including sites like MySpace, FaceBook and YouTube, marketers are trying out what is known as “crowdsourcing.” Crowdsourcing is an approach that engages the audience with the brand at a more personal level.
When hundreds of millions of people visit these social network sites on a daily basis, marketers feel they can least afford to miss such opportunities. But the going isn’t as smooth as the figures indicate and it will be a major error to plunge into this arena without proper planning and development strategy.
Difficult to target
This is primarily because most major social network sites have a mix of users and it’s it very difficult to target a special demography. This leads to wastage of a large percentage of the advertising dollar.
Secondly, buying or shopping is secondary in the priority list of social network users. A social network is largely based around actions (responding to messages, posting to walls, managing friendships) and experience (browsing and finding new people and content).
In the state of action, it is hard to distract the users - the management of friend networks is vastly more valuable than time spent exploring advertisements. In the state of experience, users are exploring peer-produced content - which proves to be almost exhaustively interesting.
Holds tremendous potential
This makes proper measure of advertising effectiveness difficult, unless a proper model for measurement is developed. Though in its early stages, the medium holds tremendous potential.
As consumers continue to frequent social networking sites and consume or contribute, social media is here to stay. Marketers ignoring this trend are missing out on an important new communications medium. |
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