Today

“Post it on your wall”, “I’m tweeting this”, “I just got an RSS that Anna ji had coconut water”. I doubt if our parents will make sense of such jargon, but for today’s generation this is the official addition to our language.  Social media has become such an intricate part of our lives that it won’t be exaggeration when I say we tweet first, and think later.   

Social media products such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Wikipedia, YouTube and the new Google+, combined with access from mobile devices, shows just how pervasive social media has become. If we talk numbers, Twitter has grown from 27 million Tweets per day in 2010 to 95 million— a 250 per cent increase. Facebook has grown globally from 350 million active users to 640 million— half of which log in daily. Wow! Isn’t that just incredible? At least for me it is. Feeds from such sites are what greet me instead of the old fashioned newspaper and tea in bed. Such has been the coverage of these instruments, that I hardly read the newspaper anymore. Those plenty apps I’m surrounded with pretty much update me with almost everything under the sun. May it be any recent development of Lokpal, or the hurricane rocking The US, I can keep myself updated.

We all know the cutting edge ruthless competition in the corporate world. A whole department of an organization is solely dedicated to marketing their products and services in the best possible manner to their clients. Much of efforts go into satisfying the clients, finding new ones, following up with everyone, and being always on a lookout for betterment in ways of feedback and after sales. This continuous need to be better than the best, has led to the merging of the above mentioned resources and the inherent corporate need to exploit it. There’s the answer; at the speed of light the competitive companies are jumping into the wagon of marketing through social media. Brilliant idea I’d say. The perfect example of a breakthrough is the fan page of “Taco Bell’ on Facebook. With a following of 7,468,300 plus fans, the illustrative information and current offers has typically been at the forefront in a manner that’s easily relatable.

Not only is this a low-cost promotional strategy that provides the businesses with large number of links and huge amount of traffic, but the companies also manage to get massive attention and that really is a win-win for everyone.  The idea has caught wind with effective marketers who also refer to books such as ‘The Twitter Book’ that teaches everything one needs to know to quickly become a Twitter power user, including strategies and tactics for using Twitter’s 140-character messages as a serious and effective way to boost your business.

Victoria’s Secret is a brand known to all, but it took a sudden whoosh from just an e-commerce site to creating a Facebook and Twitter page. The Twitter page seems to be well-established, with over 163,149 followers and several tweets updated daily.  I would say that @VictoriasSecret knows how to draw a crowd.  They are also very good at keeping followers updated and making a deeper connection between the customer and the brand.

It’s awe-inspiring to see the online marketers put in so much effort to the minutest of the needs of their target market, and it is not easy. Segregating all the clients’ as per their tastes, needs and financial restraints is surely an ass-kicker; and what’s more-you’ve got to be at the top of your game all time- each day, every day. Dynamic is the environment and so are the needs of the customers-ever changing. It’s not a one-time thing that you do and you’re done with.

With the huge radical growth of these social networks and the enhanced adorability of such networks among the social population the application of social media marketing has attained high demand. Companies now use it to promote their product, brands and services.  Not just that, the presence on social networking sites in a consistent and interactive manner adds up to build the brand value in terms of credibility and trust. With regular exchange of opinions and feedback, one can expect colossal returns in terms of understanding consumer’s choices and tastes. The organization can be a part of groups and create their own pages on such sites which offer real time interaction, better display of the newly launched products, and a query forum to better explain the customers about the products and clarify their doubts in a categorical manner.

 Amongst all these outrageous benefits, the cherry on the cake is the promotion on the search engine ranking. (I trust the first link on Google the most).  Another major tool of the social platform is the creation of a comprehensive blog which again reinforces the search engine ranking.

The world is getting closer every day and everyone wants to be connected. Static blogs and websites are losing popularity.  The world is moving more towards "information streams". The information comes to users rather than users making effort to get the information.