Ineffectiveness In Social Media

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Introduction There has been an ever increasing focus on the rise of social media - hereby shortened to SM - and its role in advertising and marketing in recent years. Coinciding with this has been the idea that television and other traditional media’s role in the field is on the decrease. Taylor (2013) argues that the “sensationalist, scaremongering messages about the demise of TV advertising” is not in truth, a reality and that social media actually have a “limited role to play”. This essay looks to examine this perspective whilst offering insights into the mechanisms of SM and how an initial perspective examining its ineffectiveness compared with that of television and traditional advertising does not fully realise the impact SM can have,…show more content…
Bruner 11 & Kumar (2000) discussed how advertising has to “fight” for the attention of the user with all the other information that is on a web page and that with television there are no other distractions. Following on from that is the work of Hadija, Barnes, Hair (2012) whose qualitative research of a small number of students and their use of social networks revealed that “only 20% of respondents noticed the advertisements in online social networks...40% of them...didn’t noticed them at all or noticed the ads occasionally”. They also found that “80% never purchased a product advertised in online social networks”. While this qualitative research can not be seen as any way definitive due to it’s small scale, their other finding that “only 10% of respondents believed social networks were better in promoting the brands” does run parallel with the statistic that Taylor (2013) referred to wherein only 17% (US) 14% (UK) of 1000 people surveyed had started using a brand after using it’s…show more content…
This moves beyond advertisements generated by companies placed as banner ads and other basic examples of online advertising as the only way for companies to have an impact on-line. Their study related to an online micro-lending marketplace called Kiva.com and the effect of earned media from SM outlets (SMO) compared to traditional media outlets (TMO) on sales. Their findings were a double edged sword. While TMO had a larger impact on sales “per-event” (that is, a mention in a TMO) due to the naturally larger scope, it was less frequent and in the long run the smaller, but more frequent “per-event” effect from SMO activity had a “substantial long-term impact on sales”. It both backs up Taylor's argument while also highlighting that marketers should also focus effort on generating e-WOM trough earned media

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