Social Media is Changing the Landscape for Businesses and Brands
Social Media has changed the game for virtually everyone that is online the last 20 years. It has impacted people, businesses, brands, ethnic groups, governments, and many other important topics. It has changed the landscape across the board and will continue to do so as more businesses and brands take to social media to stay relevant.
It will impact many brands and put them out of business if they don’t change and adapt. This will be similar to traditional stores struggling and going bankrupt when other stores moved online and traditional stores that were in malls and shopping centers were late to join the transition. The same thing is going to happen to businesses if they can’t move quickly and laterally to social media and adapt when needed.
This is going to be important in many ways. It will allow consumers to interact with the businesses and brands they like, or have issues with, to get answers and find out information. It also will allow brands to become more transparent and become more personable and not just some big corporation that no one can directly talk to or interact with.
Social Media Levels the Playing Field
It is also going to level the playing field for smaller companies to compete with larger corporations. This will happen to those brands who can be more versatile and have more of a web based presence. They can build trust and have a large following without having to have thousands of stores across the nation. Brands like Amazon, Warby Parker, and others have proven it can be done.
Consumers will no longer have to search online to find answers. They can go on chat or in the social media feeds and find all the information they need in just a few minutes. When 3.5 billion people are on social media at some point every day then this is not a surprise. 54% of those people do research on products before they ever head to a store or by the products online. This is just going to grow.
The only saving grace for slow moving brands to social media is that just opening accounts on networks and having a website sometimes takes years for brands to see a return on the investment, it does bring about transparency and brand awareness even before the search engines index the sites the way they should be done.
Social Media has Many Advantages
Social media not only gets information, stories, blogs, advertisements, videos, and anything else posted out there immediately, it also allows instant interaction and if the brands are quick to respond and interact with their consumers, readers and potential clients the quicker the brand will spread.
We have all seen viral marketing and viral posts make an impact on a company really quick and they are all over the place in no time. Once a major news source, or social media site, picks it up the sky is the limit. We are talking millions of views in a matter of days or weeks.
Most people these days have 8 or 9 social media accounts and your brand has to be on several of these to appear you are “everywhere”. If you are not, then your brand is going to miss the boat and potentially left behind. Marketing researchers go by the rule of 7. This means that a person has to see your brand at least 7 times before they are going to purchase your product or use your service.
They only way to do this is being on most social media networks, or at least the largest and most successful ones like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc. This will make your brand seem omnipotent. That matters in the big picture of things. Consumers remember those companies that are present and will interact with them by making posts and answering questions.
Marketing is changing on a daily basis and brands have to do what is necessary to keep up. They can’t worry about losing money the first couple of years they build their web presence, as they will make that money up. What is a definite, is that if they don’t have a web presence the company has a lot less chance of becoming successful.
References
Mahoney, M. (2021, March 18). The Impact of Social Media on Business in 2021. Single Grain. https://www.singlegrain.com/blog-posts/impact-of-social-media-in-todays-business-world/.