In this consumer driven world, the social media has emerged as an important place where people connect with others, share their views and opinions about a wide variety of things and give their feedback on products/services that they have found either useful or worthless. So, with the advent of social media, it can be said that the power to decide and influence which once rested with the large organizations has now shifted into the hands of the individual participants.
With its unlimited potential, social media has emerged as an effective tool for branding. If you can spare some time and effort, you can reap incredible benefits from social media. The best part is that you don’t need to shell out any money for getting your brand established by means of social media.
In the competitive world of the present age, you need proper branding for your products/services to get noticed and hold on to your loyal customers. If you want to stand out from the crowd and excel, you can’t ignore branding and that’s where social media plays an important part. Once you start participating in the various social media online, you will be able to create an effective branding for your offerings by talking about your products/services and asking the readers’ feedback. As the other participants of these social media connect to you and understand what you have to offer, where you are coming from and what your future plans are, they will start developing a strong association with you. As these people refer you to their friends who in turn refer your brand name to their own network, you will be able to reach a wide audience without any extra cost. When someone will ask these people about a product/service that you offer, chances are high that your brand name will get recommended. Once you establish such a loyal audience, you will not need to worry much about losing your brand name with the ups and downs of the market. In brief, social media can be an effective tool in paving your way to success.
Though social media is very effective for branding, the same doesn’t hold true for advertising. This is primarily due to the nature of the social media. People usually come to network with people and share their concerns, views, opinions, likes and dislikes at these places. As the basic mood is to mingle with people and get to know what their views are, commercialism takes a backseat. People participating in these social media are not inclined to buy. So, these are not good places to invest money for advertising your products/services. I can say this surely as I have wasted some money advertising my products on a popular social media. After being successful with branding my products using this new age media, I thought of going ahead with my advertising campaign. The biggest mistake I did was to ignore the basic mood of people who use these social media. I didn’t give too much of a thought on the fact that why would someone coming to interact with people be interested to buy a product, the information of which is unsolicited in most of the cases. Well, I learnt my lesson the hard way around.
To conclude, I can vouch for the efficiency of social media for branding. However, the same can’t be told when it comes to using social media for advertising.
What do you say? Have you ever advertised in any Social Media websites and got good results? If yes please do share your views. If no, still please share your experiences.
