Social Media – The new era of marketing

The social media sites that engaged in our normal daily life, such as Wikipedia, Facebook, YouTube, are markedly increased with time. Furthermore, the impact of social media on our human race and the whole society are increasingly significant. However, the phrase Social media has been tossed around a lot these days, and it can sometime be difficult to define precisely.

After the first class of IEMS 5723, I found the very understandable way to describe this phrase is to compare it with the regular ones. Media is an instrument to enable and support the communication. The traditional media can be comparing to a one-way street that provide you no opportunity to present your perspectives, no right to discuss with others, but listen and read. On the contrary, social media is a two-way street that allows everyone to share ideas, photos, videos, likes and dislikes, and provides you a bunch of chances to find friends, dates, communities and business opportunities. According to the lecture, social media is remarkable competitive in its coverage, immediacy, reach ability, frequency, accessibility, permanence, etc.

Figure 1.regular media and social media

Because of these features, social media is of particular interest to businesses, and it does provide a new approach to an efficient and joyful marketing. The advertising revenue of Facebook reached USD $4.3 billion in 2012. There comes the term, social media marketing, which take advantage of the exploding popularity of social media sites to reach potential customers. For instance, Nike, a world famous company, once initialized an absorbing activity via Wei Chat. It asks users to upload a photo of their favorite shoes, and then Nike would generate a customized pattern for each customer with a link of online purchasing. The success of this practice own to plenty factors, the most significant one is the right analysis of social media, which appears as the most significant and thorny tissue to all sizes of businesses.

Fortunately, IEMS 5723 is such a course that shows us the methods of analyzing social media. The first two lectures gives us a general understanding of social media analytics, covers the fundamental paradigms, technology, users and user generated contents (UGC) analyzing, nature language processing (NLP), etc. And I am looking forward to the next lecture. 

Reference

[1] Social Media [Online] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media

[2] Khang, H, Ki, E, & Ye, L, Social media research in advertising, communication, marketing, and public relations, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, May, 2012.
[3] Cool Social Media Marketing [Online] http://www.solveitmedia.com/