Marketing and advertising is a fairly recent notion and was initially coached as a subject at tertiary level in the 1950′s. A simple definition of marketing is:” to produce an environment that is responsive to goods and services to be sold to a market”. Marketing has four legs (called the four P’s of marketing), i.e.: Product, Price, Promotion and Packaging. Any form of advertising or selling a product, falls in the category of Promotion, of which advertising is a part. So, social media marketing is part of the Promotional element of marketing.
Social media marketing concerns the marketing of a product or solutions, via the social media, which includes the online world and mobile devices, like cellular phones and PC tablets. This clearly is a very much newer approach to marketing and has flourished with a force over the past ten years, but in the past 3-5 years especially it has reached incredible power of persuasion. Consider the effectiveness of social media marketing, in thinking about the following facts: America has a teenage population of some twenty two million. It’s estimated that teenagers in the USA has a primary impact on the spending of 60% of the family cash flow. Seventy five percent of USA teenagers own mobile phones, of which girls (15-18) do up to an average of eighty text messages a day and boys thirty per day. This excludes any web activity on social networking sites. The use of cell phones and other mobile media is therefore thoroughly entrenched in the American population and is quite certainly a significant opportunity to social media marketing. Similar statistics are applicable to Europe, The UK and Australia.
There’s hardly a retailer of note nowadays that doesn’t have multiple links to social bookmarking websites like Face Book, Twitter and others. There is even a social networking web site focused on professionals for displaying their skilled detail with a link to contacting them. The above demonstrates the possible scope for marketers in the world of mobile devices. The amount of people are there, the technology is there and the right target market is out there. So, is social media marketing a great success? The answer to such question appears to be a qualified ‘yes’. Why a qualified ‘yes’, only to the question of whether social media marketing is a success? The answer seemingly lies in human conduct, but such behaviour can be circumvented by intelligent marketing technique. In the first instance there is a natural instinct of people to be resistant to marketing and secondly, young adults, today, like to tell and not to be told by any authority. This means any social media marketing needs to solicit conversation with its audience and establish itself as an ‘influencer’ of authority in any given topic, and as such become a ‘social authority’ on a particular subject or product or service. Once users start discussing such topic among them, credibility is established and the principal of viral marketing kicks in, whereby the value of the product or service being marketed, is spread by the users of social networking sites, apart from the original marketing/ marketing strategy launched by the marketers to the people.
Social media marketing without doubt is a very powerful marketing channel if used appropriately and it has a huge potential market.

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