Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Why Social Media is critical to marketers?

I had registered myself for the ‘Digital Marketing World’ a virtual conference arranged by Marketing Profs. While browsing through the topics of webinars, I stumbled upon a very interesting webinar on Twitter success stories. Many of us think that social media is just another fad and will quickly fade away. However, social media seems to get bigger by the day. E.g. of the total visitors to twitter, 41.7% belong to the age group 35-49 years, followed by 19.6% in 25-34 years(and we always thought people in age group 25-34 are socially most active than any other age groups). Most surprisingly, 16.6% visitors belong to age group 55 and above. The number of active internet users in the world is also mind-boggling. There are 625 million active internet users in the world whereas this number is roughly 230 million in Asia-pacific. Can marketers afford to ignore this silent revolution?

What’s the secret of this incredible growth in active usage of social media? In my opinion, there are two most important reasons. Firstly, social media harnesses the power of anonymity. Secondly it is the only ‘many-to-many’ mode of communication that we have developed so far. While the anonymity lends power to consumers to speak their mind freely, uniqueness of this mode of communication lends power to marketers because they can not only communicate with consumers but get a feedback from them almost in real time.

Though the whole concept is still nascent and is evolving, marketers cannot afford to ignore this revolution. The webinar also talks about some companies which have woven their marketing strategies around social media.

Here’s how you can visit the virtual conference:
http://www.marketingprofs.com/events/9/conference

6 comments:

  1. Surprising- the age group, thats in the majority following twitter!!!

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  2. rightly stated, from the above statitics we can see, how in the coming years a word of mouth from your social network will be important to take your decisions.

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  3. Sreeram,
    Thanks for the article and sharing the results as well as clearing the mis-conceptions of the large section that believed that Twitter has been the ground of the young stars across the globe.
    Infact, your seniors have idetified this trend early on and have attempted to capitalize on it. It was the belief in the power of social networking that has led to the set of ThoughtBuzz. Talk to them and they would throw more light on this concept!

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  4. Thanks for mentioning ThoughtBuzz Decide and Invest. May i know who are you?

    As twitter is the best example of many to many, we see that youngsters are not the one taking it too aggressively as they dont want everybody to know what they are doing :)

    Another interesting read is here:

    http://www.nytimes.com/external/readwriteweb/2009/08/28/28readwriteweb-twitter-effects-power-overstated-when-it-co-36333.html

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  5. Great number crunch.. I think it's a high time for me to get on twitter. Don't have account there yet. :)

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  6. Hi.... never thought so much in detail about the topics .... rather issues .... about which u discussed at length .... Thanx a lot ....

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