Social Media as a Marketing Tool

Have you ever joked, had fun or expressed your ideas and thoughts on the web? You probably think that social networking sites such as facebook, twitter and youtube are spaces where you can join a group, or criticise brands or politics freely. Nevertheless, this is far from the reality. More and more companies use social networking as a marketing tool.

Facebook alone has over 500 million registered users spending on average 700 billion minutes a month viewing this site. In addition, consumers frequenting social networking sites and consuming or contributing to this media, are growing up. With stats like this, marketers couldn't ignore this trend and miss out on an important communication media.

Furthermore, social media marketing has very positive benefits:

• they are relatively inexpensive

• they don't need additional staff

• they are accessible to enable anyone (even private individuals) to publish or access information

However, marketers cleverly execute this kind of marketing because, while we are resistant to marketing in general, we are even more resistant to direct or overt marketing through social media platforms. This is the main reason why nowadays, marketers present themselves as social authorities with credibility. A marketer knows that we will not be receptive to a marketing message in and of itself.

In 2008, a survey reported that the majority (58%) of the respondents most trusted companies or product information coming from "people like me" while in 2010, the majority (64%)switched to preferring their information from industry experts and academics. Why this changing?

In the past, marketers used social media badly. They were asking their employees to take part in a forum, a group or a facebook page to avoid a negative image. The problem was that the employees were hiding the fact that they were working for the brand they were defending.

Once this strategy was discovered, companies started to work to be seen as social authorities with credibility.

What next?

All things considered, companies monitor social as well as traditional media to supply protection to their brand while lots of “social media gurus” like to talk about how social media is all about “joining the conversation” and “listening to the customers.” Social media is just another marketing tool which has the same value as other marketing tools.