By Himanshu Guru: While it is tough to promote your products and services in real world, it’s even harder to do so in the virtual world – Internet. Social media plays the most important role in Internet marketing. Emergence of Social media has created a powerful online consumer force. Social Media (SM) is an independent platform where consumers freely share their opinions upon the pros or cons of a certain product. Hence, sometimes it has been seen that the marketers have started to make new strategies keeping in view this new consumer behavior rejecting the traditional ways of doing business.
Social media is a social platform available on the Internet which mediates human communication. It uses web and mobile based technologies to support interactive comments and establishes communication between organizations, communities and individuals. Gadgets with latest technologies such as Smartphones, tablets and laptop computers allow a user anytime anywhere to respond and take action to decide, criticize or appreciate a product.
In these days social media have become one of the most powerful sources for updates through platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Social media uses several formats of technologies such as blogging, micro blogging, wikis, podcasts, photographs or pictures, video and social bookmarking. However, social networking used by Facebook, Micro blogging used by Twitter and video uploading through YouTube are the major sources which have hugely affected world consumers to decide in regard to a certain product.
It has been observed that Facebook has turned to be the first choice for many to communicate. Also, Twitter processes almost 40 million tweets per day. And in this way these sites provide a constant source of alternative feedback for users in the market.
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However, besides these most popular sites there are number of other sites which are either popular in a continent or country or are mostly used by a certain category of people and enjoy a huge place to decide for Internet marketing. They are – Stumbleupon, Reddit, Pinterest, Digg, Folkd, Care2, Current, Diigo, Ebaumsworld, Hotklix, Gather etc.
Corporate houses directly advertise their products either on different sites or employ professional writers to write directly or indirectly to promote their products. The SEOs and social media professionals promote these articles on web to get maximum hits which eventually booms up the sale of the product or service.
In this whole process, Social Media plays the major role. Why? A normal consumer behavior is that it does not moves with any luring claim or clever market techniques by the manufacturing or marketing Company, but when it comes across with the independent findings of other subscribers/users of that product, he naturally switches upon to the views, which were put by maximum of those users.
As we have discussed earlier that in the platform of social media people communicate to each other, so they also communicate their likes or dislikes about the products and in most of the cases, assigning the reasons thereof. Thus, in this way the consumer, who is waiting for a decision to whether to go for a product or not easily takes a decision, which either heightens or lessens the market.