Jump onto the Platform or Drown: Social Media Platforms

If you were to ask businesses across the country about market research and advertising 20 years ago, they would have said, “I think we know what people want.” Well, 20 years later they know what consumers want, and in a big way. The marketing and advertising schemes involving door-to-door sales and community events are definitely coming to a screeching halt. The internet is now the community and social platforms are now the marketplaces. As businesses develop, they understand that they can no longer afford to be one-dimensional. For every one customer in person, companies can obtain 10 at the same time via social communities online. 

As long as a company has a product that the right people want, they will have success on the Internet. Everyday is like an open market for endless advertising capabilities and marketing schemes. Small companies can advertise for free and can eliminate extra overhead costs associated with a marketing department. It definitely eliminates the middleman, while for large companies it becomes an extra middleman. For example, if the President started wearing Nike shoes to public speeches and meetings, Nike sales would take off instantly. The media would jump on the opportunity to explain what kind of Nike shoes the President was wearing, and because word on the Internet travels faster than any other marketing tool, people would start buying the next day. It is all about trends and social value of certain products, but like everything in life, it is a domino effect.

The biggest social media marketing tool to ever exist is Facebook, and I’m sure that you know that. The reason Facebook is so successful is not because people like to buy merchandise on the site. The desire to buy is just as informative as buying itself, and that is something Facebook does well. It provides companies with the resources to make executive decisions for their business models and marketing initiatives. Social platforms become the middlemen and reduce cost of marketing budgets like print, billboards, etc. So as long as these networks produce information cheaply, companies are going to continue to exhaust the network’s potential resources. And given that Facebook is a 70 billion dollar company, I don’t think that we are going to see a change in the trend anytime soon.

Corporations have embedded themselves in social networking through analyzing data on these platforms. They create jobs everyday for people to promote their products on these platforms. So if we hypothetically personify social platforms as a raft, we will see that this raft is pretty heavy. Everyday, more and more people are loading up so make sure you get your spot before you drown.