Social Media started with Facebook. Well, that’s wrong, but believe it or not Social Media was not started by the intention of connecting friends and family. It started by sending an e-mail in 1971 with the first solely social interaction site developing in 1997, Six Degrees.
The evolution of social media has been extremely swift, from its first site in 1997 to Periscope in 2015. When it first became handy, although people did start using it to connect and get closer with friends and family however its development made us familiar with the concept of Social Media Marketing. Most businesses have shifted to social media to increase their sales as social networks allow one to get the name out there, by interacting with the target demographic which can create a chain effect in growing the business.
On a daily basis we check our phones around 150 times, it is the first thing we do in the morning, the last thing we do at night and continually throughout the day, now this has very wisely been used by the marketeers when they decided to slip in their product on our feed through ads, stories, posts, live streams, adding the buy button and turning the whole system into a clickbait. Social Media has become so easy that everyone decides to start a business through their Instagram page. It’s not all wrong, many brands have seen a visible difference after displaying their product on social media, it’s also appropriate to use social media to get your target audience as over 3 billion people use it. The whole thing seems like child’s play, right? however that’s not the whole truth. Social Media is not all free. Yes, you read that right, and am not even talking about the paid features. The thing is that we get so caught up in the immediacy of basic, free social media use that we forget about the social possibilities or consequences that is so important for the business and not something done for fun. Knowing you need social media for your business is no longer enough, you must build social media marketing into your budget. There are so many aspects, trends, contents that need to be looked upon which requires a good amount of serious time and, people Time is Money.
There are so many trends to pick from, nevertheless these three are shooting the sales,
Virtual Reality: As of early 2021, Facebook is leveraging the Oculus VR platform to beta-test a virtual world that allows people to explore, connect with others, and play games
Augmented reality: Recently McDonalds came up with the Spice Zapper Filter which allowed the brand to engage more customers. In E-commerce AR helps consumers try their products on, through the phone camera
Humanizing: In a Twitter survey, 74% of respondents want brands to showcase acts of kindness and 77% feel more positively about brands that try to support society during this crisis
Therefore, social media marketing is such a concept that we cannot afford to not afford it.
Well written.