Stuvia.co.uk - The Marketplace for Revision Notes & Study Guides
Unit 3 Social Media for Business
Assignment 1 - Explore the impact of social media on the ways in which businesses promote
their products and services
Introduction, Evolution and Developments of Social Media, how it affects the businesses and the
way they are promoting their products/services.…………………….…………………….………….……….…………..2
Features, structure and target audience of different social media websites, which are used for
business marketing. How can these aid meet and exceed the business needs?……………....……………..3
Strengths / weaknesses of social media platform………..………………..……………….…………….…….…………..9
How businesses can use social media websites to support their business aims and needs..……..……..7
Risk assessment, health and safety
Risks and issues of using social media for businesses, case study.……….………………………………………….14
Communicating with customers & customer service………..………………..…….…….…………….…….……..…..18
Conclusion…………………………………………..…………….………..………………..……………….…………….…….…………..20
Bibliography………………………………………..…………….………..………………..……………….…………….…….…………..21
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Introduction & Evolution and developments of social media, how it affects
the businesses and the way they are promoting their products and services.
What is social media and how does it defer from physical communication and traditional business
advertisement and customer engagement?
When the internet did not exist all type of long distance communication were slow and costly.
Traditional marketing used by many businesses, before the internet was really a thing (during the
18th and most of the 19th century), included banners, leaflets, bill boards, posters and door to door
marketing. However, none of these methods were able to reach such a wide scope of potential
customer base as social media. The cost of these types of marketing was high, offering a limited
efficiency and return of investment (ROI).
During the late 19th century with the help of the growing popularity of social media platforms such as
Facebook, businesses could reach out to hundreds of thousands of potential customers, with a cost
close to zero.
Now there are millions of people using social media across the globe all connected through the
internet. Powerful portable devices such as smartphones with the ability to access the internet are
becoming more and more popular leading to the continuous upward trend of social media usage.
People are accessing social media while waiting at coffee shops, bus stops, restaurants, while
walking outside and while traveling. Everyone is connected and this is a huge step-up from the old
times, the evolution of social media platforms and their features are presenting businesses with
unforeseen opportunities for customer engagement and advertisement.
Social media marketing could be categorised in two main groups, one is through paid advertisement
(advertisement agencies/companies) and another is through the social media and human-
generated-content (people liking and sharing and getting out content about your business)
Usually when I business goes through the process of building its brand and gaining following they
need to use a marketing companies through paid advertisements to establish the presence of their
business on social media.
The definition of social media:
Social media, in other words Social networking websites have evolved into an online communication
tool between businesses, communities, organizations and individuals, allowing them to build
relationships and interact with each other by sharing content, opinions, feeling and things they find
interesting. One of the many appealing factors of social media channels in the ability for consumers
to directly engage with companies. This type of almost one-to-one interaction, offers a more
personal approach to customers compared to traditional means of advertising.
Social networking sites and online content has the ability to reach billions of users around the world,
giving the online world of mouth a powerful far reaching voice.
For a business to be successful on social media they have to build an online community, they have
to be spoken about on different social networking platforms, chat boards and blogs. Building and
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growing an online community is the most powerful and influential way by which a business can
develop an online presence. The importance of a community and the feel of belonging is high as
everyone has the need to be heard, everyone wants to share what they value, what they want and
need. Your business community will be sharing and repeating your message (with the ability to
“comment”, “repost” and “retweet”) growing itself by reaching more people and increasing traffic to
the company.
What makes social networking sites even greater as an advertisement choice is the ability to shortlist
users accounts, the ability to select who should see your adverts, this not only gives the ability to
target otherwise niche audience but will allow the business to precisely focus its efforts on people
whose accounts shows that they are matching the target audience criteria (maybe they have a
specific interest in something related, or they could be the right age and demographic.) Various
social networking sites often times have users with different interests which brings the question of
which platform is best for your business. That would be based on the profile of the audience you are
trying to target. Here are some examples of the most popular social media websites as well as the
features, strengths and weaknesses they have.
Features, structure and target audience of different social media websites,
use for business marketing. How can these aid meet and exceed the business
needs?
1. Facebook:
Facebook is social media website for customised business pages and communication with
costumers, benefiting from one of the largest database of social media users, ideal for
diverting traffic to your website. Direct advertisement via Facebook will build a long
lasting loyal community of customers.
Facebook offers the ability to share things quickly and thus promotes the creation of viral
content by serving as a platform for spreading ideas quickly. Facebook’s huge base of users (over
1 billion) only help with the purpose. Main features are the ability to re-share content as a
“post” or a “status update” in form of text photos and videos. The function allowing users to
“like” and “share” content, on Facebook, also serves the powerful notion of quickly and
effortlessly spreading ideas over to millions of people, (in a viral manner similar to way viruses
spread.)
Features particularly useful for marketers: the ability to categorise users by their interests and
hobbies allows for a narrower but more accurate focus of the campaigns on people who have
searched for similar products or have shared things in similar categories within Facebook or on
their browser (if the user searched those externally, then Facebook is able to access this data via
the cookies stored in the browser). Audience categorisation is vital to reaching the target
audience of your choice. This is a very powerful tool as it will undoubtedly increase the ROI
percentage of the marketing campaign.
How does Facebook structure benefit the businesses creating marketing campaigns?
The ability to share location within a post in Facebook, could prove indeed very useful for
businesses which offer their services on physical location such as a restaurant or a museum. This
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