Showing posts with label Social Media. Show all posts

50 million people: The change in marketing

Look at the image above. These are the number of years it took to have 50 million users. As you can see, the world seems to adapt new developments a lot quicker than in the past. What is especially striking is that the last few years the user plays an increasingly important goal, because web 2.0 allows users to generate content.

• 25% of the results of the top 20 brands is user-generated content

• 34% of the bloggers, with a total of 200 million blogs, write opinions about products and brands

• 78% of the consumers rely on the advice of someone else

• 14% of the consumers rely on advertisements by the company

This has a great impact on marketing, since consumers seem to rely more on the opinions of others than on advertisements on radio, television or internet. Therefore, marketers need something else to attract the attention of the consumers.

This is when Social Media Marketing arises. As was shown before, Facebook is an upcoming medium which has now over 680 million users. So, when marketers spread their advertisements through social media many people will be reached. However, an advertisement needs to be striking, which is done by making a personalized campaign.

In these campaigns the name or a picture of the user is displayed, which mostly has a positive effect for the company, since the user feels personally addressed and therefore pays more attention to the campaign. However, marketers go further and further with this. A lot of user-generated data is available for the marketers and they can use it whenever they want.

But where is the line? What if your phone number is used in an advertisement? Or what if your private photos are showed in a campaign? In the research project for my research traineeship I will examine where the boundary lies. When feel people threatened in their privacy? In Partnership with Hyves (the biggest Dutch social network), a master student and Tilburg University I will investigate this the coming months. Of course I will keep you informed of my findings on my blog.

I believe that due to privacy concerns, it is only a matter of time until 50 million people will unsubscribe from Facebook.

Facts are from: http://www.rogenica.nl