social mediaHave you ever imagined where the term Social Media Marketing came from? Tracing its exact history is out of our concern, but it is important to know that companies are always active in finding places where their consumers spend a lot of time, so that they can market their product at the right place. Whether in restaurants, malls, banks, cinemas or any other place, companies are amenable to advertise their products at the selected and crowded places. The term social media marketing service is also derived in this context, where the presence of social media networks and chat forums has opened a new horizon for companies to expand their marketing spectrum.

If you notice the right side of your Facebook screen, you will notice that it is all engrossed with ads, postcards and other stuff related to different brands. This is the place which the brands utilize to expose their product to the target market. The one benefit of this strategy over the strategies of billboard marketing is that one ad is visible to everyone and companies do not need to select various locations to post their ads and pay top dollar for each site selection. In this way, one ad is visible to the entire public, and this augments the market coverage of the brand. The visibility and impact might not be as pronounced as it is with the giant billboards at some expensive and commercial locations, but it cannot be overlooked that it is being visualized by more public than those costly billboards. The same is true for TV and radio ads. If a company wants to market from the TV medium, it has to pay quite a good sum to each TV broadcasting channel. This increases companies’ expenditures to a great extent, in comparison to the sum required in social media marketing.

In today’s world, the power of words of an individual is greater than it was ever before. Many people base their buying decisions not on what being marketed and advertised by the company, but on the experience and reviews of other people. This helps them in learning from others and making their buying decision on rational grounds. This has motivated many companies to use the blog network and chat rooms as the tools to refine their product image in front of their consumers. In the last one decade or so, the importance and growth of social networks have flourished profoundly. The number of blogs updated daily has reached up to a substantial figure and to further amaze, many consumers skip the main content of the web and jump to the blog part. This is where the power of social media networking and bonding can be underlined and capitalized.

A report summarizing the experience of many of the corporate sales representatives addressed the fact that social media marketing can help in determining the brand success and customers’ satisfaction level. While many consumers are reluctant in giving sincere opinions in the market research surveys, they are active at the social networking sites and blogs. This engagement of consumers can be used in figuring out the loopholes and weak areas of the product, in order to minimize the gap between customers’ expectations and the delivered product.

Contributor: Mark Anderson is a fulfilled husband and father living a successful life in Texas, U.S.A. He is a business counselor and website developer on a full time basis at Studioxcess.net.