Daily Times

Social media, since it’s invention has become a ubiquitous part of our lives because of its wide use in almost every walk of life. The form of media is rapidly evolving into various social networking sites that enable its users across the world to interact with each other and share their experiences through text-based posts, videos, and photographs.

Social media has a significant influence on peoples’ lives as it is growing at a staggering pace, attracting millions of new users on a daily basis. This digital revolution has also enabled social media users to connect, communicate, and interact with each other on convenient and accessible platforms, making information search and dissemination much easier.

Consumer participation in social media is considered as a challenge for corporations, as consumers’ influence on corporate image of organizations, have an impact on corporation’s online identity and firms’ value and investor decisions. Consumers’ dissemination of information through social media has a persuasive influence on other consumers’ preferences, providing marketers a reason to care about driving positive conversation about their brands.

According to a recent study, nine out of 10 marketers spend approximately 11 percent of their marketing budget on social media while 89 percent of consumers believe on electronic word of mouth and 81 percent of consumers are influenced by the online recommendations of their friends posted on social media.

The study shows that 70 percent of female consumers call up their contacts to ask about the brand names of products they prefer to use and nine out of 10 brand related conversations are held online in today’s digital era. On average, an active social media user has around 200 friends online, an average user becomes a fan of two pages every month and on every 10 invites, users are likely to accept 2 invitations every month.

This is why marketers have started integrating social media marketing strategies along with traditional marketing and communication strategies. Through integrating social media marketing in the traditional strategies, marketers nowadays are engaging and involving customers through various tactics and strategies to build their narrative on respective brands and compel them to share their feedback and reviews online for other prospective customers.

The feedback can either be negative or positive but has a persuasive influence on a large number of prospective customers’ preferences and expectations. If we compare social media with other marketing oriented communication, it is counted as an authentic way of communication and is very impactful in today’s digital era. Social media content about a brand can reach around hundreds of consumers in a blink of an eye while traditional mode of communication has limited reach in terms of spreading information and getting feedback in return.

This influence on consumers’ purchase intention seems to be more relevant for services than for goods or products due to intangible nature of services as is the case of restaurants and cafés, whose experiential nature involves subjective evaluations and prevents assessment of food and service quality before consumption.

Likewise, many among us have recently taken part in sharing their online reviews regarding owners of an Islamabad-based Café, who ridiculed their manager for not proficient in English language. The criticism on Café owners on social media was a real example of challenges of social media that compelled the owners of the Café to respond to it by issuing a clarification on social media and ultimately rebrand their Café in Urdu language.

Social media presents a rich platform for consumers’ engagement in negative feedback/ reviews as a revenge against a service failure or expectation letdown. Yet managing either negative or positive feedback in an effective way is very important especially in the restaurant industry as we have seen in the case of Islamabad-based Café that its owners deemed justification and apology to rebuild online reputation among customers and prospective consumers. This increasing trend of developing and applying response strategy on social media is thus in practice but it has diverse implications, creating more challenges and opportunities for social media marketers as well as social media users. Keeping social media users understanding of the facts is also a challenge for marketers. Moreover, marketers’ understanding of using social media is also a challenge.

Upon accessing the importance of social media in our lives, marketers’ top priority is to manage social media through counter marketing strategies. The strategies may include compensation, clarification/ justification or denying the facts, raising ethical concerns on part of marketers. Likewise, the customers who are using social media should also behave responsibly and should keep ethics in mind while sharing their views online as a single review online can create a buzz.

The writer is a PhD scholar based in Islamabad.