Social Media and its impact

Traditional marketing ruled until the late 2000 when companies had to spend several crores of money to do advertising. It was primarily through TV Ads, magazine ads, billboards, flyers, radio ads and even direct sales. Then came social media that totally blew all forms of conventional advertising out of the way. Companies began thinking out of the box to reach its targeted audience.

Mobile and electronic companies, whose primary audience consisted of 18-30 years were predominantly available through social media channels which included Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and even Blogs. TV ads and radio ads or even print ads for that matter rarely reached them and the way to capture their attention was through a facebook post or a sponsored tweet. Companies began to hire social media agencies who ran Twitter and Facebook contests and rewarded people who had the most influence on their posts. This was judged by the no of likes, shares and retweets they received for their corresponding facebook status or tweets

This was new for traditional companies who hadnt much experience in the internet space much less the social media front. They probably had a old website which had some standard links and a  basic design. Their incoming traffic almost dwindled down as the overall chatter happened in the micro blogging websites where people tagged companies directly through their handle and added a hashtag to create trending topics.
Such was the impact of social media that the entire advertising industry had to reinvent itself to create new channels of advertising. A lot of these companies who really tried to make it work and wanted to make a difference started customer response teams which listened to queries directly through a facebook post or even a tweet

Gone are the days when you were writing huge letters and application forms to file a claim against a repaired device . So are the process of tracking deliveries and you need to follow up with the courier agencies to basically find out where your package was. Now all you require is a tweet to the company’s handle and it probably takes a couple of hours to get your problem sorted. Immediate action is followed up with the respective teams. The companies know that any delay in this process and it can get tweeted by the public in a humiliating way. They know that a single bad tweet can impact their brand badly and every single retweet or impression will only hurt them further which can cause some irreparable damage

Companies have started not only tracking tweets to their handle but also began to track everything people are talking about their industry , their company and followed specific hashtags. They had a holistic view of what’s happening in the industry on a live platform and able to respond quickly to the market scenario
Lets hope that this social media impact makes it a win-win for all of us

This blog post is inspired by the blogging marathon hosted on IndiBlogger for the launch of the #Fantastico Zica from Tata Motors. You can  apply for a test drive of the hatchback Zica today.