The Tribulations of Social Media Marketing

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Here might come quite an unpopular opinion in the marketing world. While I certainly do understand the necessity for things that are commonly described as “buzz words” in the industry, just a fancy way of describing current trend. With the digital age it seems as if the usage of Social Media and Social Media Marketing has grown in importance, as it is the best way to come into a direct discussion and conversations with the public. Companies naturally see a one-of-a-time chance to prove themselves in the eyes of the public and build up a stronger relationship than ever before, but it does make you wonder if this new digital age has created a complete new dependence on the side of companies and marketers.

I am certainly no one who can brag about his “knowledge” or “experience” in the handling of Social Media or even Marketing, as for now I am still just a student, but being in that position I have come to realize that certain aspects of the industry do quite frighten me. Some marketers or even journalists start to distinguish their content in accordance to how it is being handled online. Does it have a large quantity of likes, shares, retweets or anything else in that matter? If so, then you have a successful content on your hand, but the focus on this seems to be an almost double-edged sword towards the way we see the created content.

For example, it is common that very crazy or even bizarre marketing concepts find a lot of popularity and ends up being shared throughout the Internet so that other people can see it as well. So while there is a popularity surrounding a specific venture, which on the surface seems to be quite a popular, there is no true proof that the quality is in any way effective. Even some ventures from journalists try to see how popular their articles are depending on how many people like it or share it, but then you have the issue that some people will realize that some are just blatant “click-bait” articles. This is in fact something I have been struggling with as well, as the current largest film-related click-bait article in my opinion is the constant re-appearing “Death of the Superhero Genre”, which seems to be quite a popular trend to talk about after a rather warm-up year before the stocked year of 2016.

While I am not here to point anything out at other journalists, who have much more experience than I do in gathering an audience, but it does points out an issue. Marketers orientation on how well a shared content shares throughout the Internet seems almost narrow-minded, as one tries to control how an article, product or anything else is spread through the World Wide Web. It has gotten so popular that Viral Marketing, the practice of spreading of content through the Internet, is probably a practice almost every single marketer has to learn about at one point. Besides the fact that the virality of created content is a rather uncontrollable element that it can compete with the ever-popular cat content online. Trying to click-bait people to have a massive amount of views could only potentially have a short-term effect to boost the companies reputation, but in the long-run might start a terrible trend that will tarnish it faster than that short burst of popularity.

Social Media isn’t a bad thing, far from it, as I mentioned before it allows for people to build up quite a strong relationship. Strongly communicating about what is happening in the future creates a transparency that no one else could have with just publishing a press release in the newspaper or even on a static page of their website. Yet the problem is a simple one. The people you can communicate with are limited to those that already are active. Furthermore, Social Media is a great representation of the Globalisation issue, companies try to aim higher as ever by trying to reach a global community, but in the end are completely limited. Everyone in the world is using Social Media Marketing, so we should do the same thing even if our audience might even be a much smaller one due to the different usage of YouTube or Twitter in a specific country.

Now one would easily point out that almost every on this planet by now is at least using Facebook, which is certainly quite showing of the strengths one can utilize from Social Media, but then I throw in the question of what value it will have? So, if many are following my company on Facebook does that mean my actual target audience is that large? Can I even add a quality to these likes? What I am trying to get at is that this industry is still way too young to truly know what to do with it, but everyone company is trying to jump on the bandwagon if it to a certain degree it is completely pointless. The audience needs to find you and creating an audience is involved with a lot of costs that may or may not affect your overall profit. IF I have 10,000 likes of my page it certainly does not mean I have just made $10,000, but probably paid way more just to even reach that number.

It certainly is never an easy question to answer and one must respect those marketers that did indeed manage to use Social Media to boost themselves, but at the same time one must question how long it took them to even get to that point. Right now many companies are trying to jump the newest bandwagon of streaming services, even trying to sponsor and learn from well-known streamers. Now, this is a completely different issue in my opinion that I may get to at another point, but I just believe that not every single bandwagon is truly worth jumping on to, because who knows how far it will truly get you.

Now you heard my opinion, but what do you think about this matter? Leave a comment below!

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