There is no doubt that social media utilization has become the most popular and highly adopted form of emerging media within today’s marketing strategies. Every company that has a presence online has been frantically trying to increase their company’s exposure by following outrageous numbers of users of Twitter, bombarding fan pages on Facebook, and are seeking the newest markets within other social media networks.
According to eMarketer senior analyst Debra Aho Williamson, the future of social media and its benefits are not only ever-changing but will play an entirely different role for companies who utilize them.
“Advertising—which some might say has already failed as a business model for social media companies—will not be the primary revenue driver,” said Ms. Williamson.
The better business model, other than utilizing social media, will lie in the mastery of analytics tools to track their conversion rates of visitors coming to websites. The use for social media in the future will not be for advertising specifically but rather for a plethora of other reasons including:
• Should be integrated within all marketing efforts
• Should be available for consumers to find out more information about your company, products, or services
And more importantly should be used for:
• Brand Monitoring
Social media will soon be the best way for companies to track and begin to understand the “why” of consumer chatter about them and their products/service as well as the “who”, “what”, and “when” of their customer base.
This statement was offered by Ravit Lichtenberg, founder and chief strategist, Ustrategy.com, in response to brand monitoring:
“Naturally occurring conversations will be utilized in product innovation and design, and companies will create incentives for people’s attention and engagement while repurposing and analyzing content and engagement in new ways that will deliver valuable input.”
In essence, social media and its use for companies will be ever-changing. However, the future use of social media will lie in helping companies get information about their consumers and hearing what they have to say about specific products or services to help them improve customer relationships.
Information Provided By: eMarketer
Blog Post Written By: Kent Seiders
