Effect Of Social Media Sites In Consumer Behaviour Marketing Essay

Effect Of Social Media Sites In Consumer Behaviour Marketing Essay The new age internet sites provided online properties to allow people to communicate with each other, unlike dead internet sites, and hence create meaningful relationships over a period of time. It may be on the ground of hobby or business, it can be anything. In the online world a company can brand itself easily and without gigantic marketing budget, through videos, discussion groups/massage boards, blogs. Social marketing is used successfully and strategically by numerous marketers to increase the appeal of their business. It is easier to find out business minded people interested in similar niche in the online world. To spruce up their network of friends with common interests successful entrepreneurs also use social networking sites, they share ideas, exchange information and in the long run establish relationships and take it to the next level then promote by becoming partners or referring someone interested in the venture. The attributes for the Social Media sites in Influencing Consumer Behaviour of innovation in models and development; and market efficiency. In a development, the amount of information available is already vast and increasing daily. The goal of our paper is to investigate the paramaters effecting Social Media sites in Influencing Consumer Behaviour. The effect of social media sites was measured by applying Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP). It uses the forecasting attributes in the proposed Consumer Behaviour model to ascertain the relative importance of the processes towards a successful Social networking sites implementation. This paper discusses the comparisons for the successful advertisements on websites or social networking sites. It also considers Social Responsiveness, Information Search, Time Spent, Peer Group Influence and Satisfaction as a parameter to see the influence of Consumer. It calculates the priority by using the Analytical Hierarchal Process Keywords: successful advertisements, Analytical Hierarchal Process, Consumer Behaviour Introduction A social networking service is an online service which is defined as an explaining the interest of practice of expanding the number of ones business and/or social contacts by making connections through individuals. Social networking has encouraged new ways to communicate and share information This explains the idea of concept that any two people on the planet could make contact through a chain of no more than five intermediaries.. Social networking websites are being used regularly by millions of people. While it could be said that email and websites have most of the essential elements of social network services. Social networking is based on 6 degree concept which explains social networking establishes interconnected Internet communities (sometimes known as personal networks) that helps people to make contacts that would be good for them to know. In general, heres how it works: you join one of the sites and invite people you know to join as well; those people invite their contacts t o join, who in turn invite their contacts to join, and the process repeats for each person. In theory, any individual can make contact through anyone they have a connection to any of people with a person and so on. Along with other form of advertising and promotion, the social networking sites also have been always the leading ideas to promote business. The purpose of the Online marketers is seriously to gain output through social networking slowly and steadily not through a business which creates through its own brand but also can create a lot of additional traffic, which would have been difficult or impossible to attain. In the initial stages the business may be slow, but latterly can build a solid foundation for a brand to fix properly through social online marketing, considered as great free advertising tool. By responding to the queries and questions with analytical insights raised by members in the niche massage boards or forums, a company appoints spokesperson can let know other members of the group about its brand and thus enable the mouth publicity to spread further. Networking is just like the next buzzword these days, but it was actually the oldest form of communication in this ancie nt world. The popularity of networking websites is spreading all over the Internet. These sites can be used as marketing tools in addition to the obvious use to make new friends. They can help increase website traffic by sending tons of traffic to your website and for an added bonus; they can also improve your search engine ranking.There are certainly some dos and donts that one must abide by to avoid criticality as Social Networking sites do not have strict rules for joiners. To understand the dos and donts that are required to follow in social networking in for promotion, a set of steps need to be folllowed in order to capture your target segment. A social network service focuses on building online communities of people who share interests and/or activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others. Most social network services are web based and provide a variety of ways for users to interact, such as e-mail and instant messaging services. Social networking has encouraged new ways to communicate and share information. Social networking websites are being used regularly by millions of people. While it could be said that email and websites have most of the essential elements of social network services, the idea of proprietary encapsulated services has gained popular uptake recently.The main types of social networking services are those which contain category divisions (such as former school-year or classmates), means to connect with friends (usually with self-description pages) and a recommendation system linked to trust. There have been some attempts to standardize these services to avoid the ne ed to duplicate entries of friends and interests, but this has led to some concerns about privacy.Though there are several social networks that are flourishing on the internet today, but the flourishing 3 websites in todays world are Face book, Linked in, twitter for the following important reasons reach , prominence, uniqueness,. purpose, customizability, and data personal experience. Face-book has come as a clear leader among all the social networking sites. According to the State of the Mobile Web report conducted by Opera Software, Facebook is also the second most popular site visited by Opera Mini users from India. Indians have shown a major transformation in usage patterns, Traditionally Indians are known to spend their time on search and email related activities on the mobile web but with the boom in the handheld-devices market. Today, availability of content and ease of access have catapulted a range of content-rich portals to rise up in the most visited domains list. According to the report, Twitter is the second largest social network site in the world with 300+ million active users worldwide. Its motive is to follow your interests, its service type is micro blogging. Its revenue is about $140million as per 2010.Its based on the principle of followers for a celebrity and total number of tweets. 57% of all Indian Twitter users have joined the platform in l ess than a year! With such quick rise in popularity and with masses coming into fold, brands and advertisers are have to quickly adapt to the ever changing dynamics of this medium.LinkedIn stands for its professional status in social networking. Its the best of its kind. Globally it has 135+ million active users. Revenue is around $121millions. LinkedIn is very oriented toward your professional network, it looks like the most professional looking of all the social networking services, and not your broader personal network. LinkedIn allows members to look for jobs, seeking out experts in a particular area, or to make contact with other professionals through a chain of trusted connections.LinkedIn Advertisements is a self-service advertising solution that allows you to create and place text advertisements on prominent pages on LinkedIn. Recently form the past some years, marketing has brought increased growth in the social networking phenomenon. Face book or Twitter have became a key part of a number of people in their daily routine. Now-a-days various Organizations consider these social media sites as a publicity vehicle of rich potential. Indeed, various companies have already enjoyed exceptionally large sales boosts as a direct consequence of endorsement from social media sites, blogs or other online communication channels. One of the most common tendencies of people making purchase decisions is by an advice from their friends. Indeed, word-of-mouth (WOM) recommendation from friends and significantly have long been recognized as a powerful weapon in any marketers armory. On that consequence, it is sensible to assume that the suggestions which emerge from friends in social media sites might have influence, which is similar to a conventional WOM recommendation. In todays world there are many Social Networking Sites in existence on the World Wide Web (WWW).   The most popular ones for business use are LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are the famous of social networking sites. These sites allow users to create profiles and add people as friend, bring people with similar interests together and also allow them to create connections to construct a social network. A social network consists of all the people friends, family and others with whom one shares a social relationship.Advertising on Social Networking Sites can be low cost. Business and organizations are focusing on the cost reduction in the current global economic scenario. Hence, this type of advertising is a highly useful strategy in this economic situation.   To compare with the conventional advertising, the Social Network Advertising seems to require time to establish the effective profile and posts, and more time to actually implement these techniques on a regular basis, b ut it have low costs for the business. Social sites are not just for the company to broadcast information for consumers, but for consumers to participate in open free conversations with these companies by posting, commenting and following their Facebook pages, Twitter accounts or blogs. Facebook and Twitter provide quick updates information and company changes functions to users and however for more engaging conversation blogs are generally used to provide more information to their audience and allow for comments and questions. Jet star Company is one of an example of using social networks to promote their company. Social Network advertising is taking advantages of reduced cost, increased sales and the customer interaction. It is important that businesses build online platform to prevent the negative effect and guarantee and maintain their Social Network as it may be damage the reputation and worth of the brand.   Social media is a great advantage to companies as it allows them to interact with people at the level that they are on, even it is through Twitter, Face book, YouTube or blogs. This involvement with their customers helps businesses to increase sales, allows the customer to be part of the brand or simply as a customer service tool. Thus, the importance of maintaining a social media plan is to ensure customers are kept in active. There would have certain disadvantages of using the Social Network, like, people share negative comments with business, though not represented to affect companies. In another way to say, it is advantage for companies to provide opportunities to improve their weakness and attract customers participation. Complaint or negative feedbacks can also arise from unsatisfied customers and quickly spread across the social sites. While social networks open the company up to negative feedback and comments, it is much better for them to be in the space so they have a chance to reply back and be heard. One of the sure concern of the Companies, and allows companies to participate with their customers and listen to their positions in the Social Network. In case of the companies without the social media sites, those customers would complain that they were not getting responses from the company, therefore company needs to set up this communication and get the root of a problem is the most crucial benefit company using social media (Burson-Marsteller, 2010). As more people are spending more time online as well as social networking sites, it indicates there are advantages for businesses to be participating in this Social Network. According to the data graph, 79% of businesses are already using some form of social networking for their business allowing them to essentially promote their brand or product to increase sales. As with the Blendtec example, a low cost effective YouTube campaign increased their sales five times (Mashable, 2009). My Starbucks Idea the Starbucks an example, which showed that companies advantage from introducing the customer into their business and building their engagement to make them feel like they are part of the businesses and providing opinions for improvement. This engagement works two ways with the consumer feeling loyalty to the brand as they are part of the company itself.When the business encourages to create Social Networking marketing or advertising, they need to organize and consider all aspects of Soci al Networking, if they have sufficient prepare of the plan or organization, it is possible to control any circumstances when it comes, in case of the negative feedbacks or complaint, companies can make improvements or respond immediately and become a part of customer service to solve and help customers in the fastest way. Overall, probably the strongest advantage of social networking in business is because of the consumer. Allowing a customer to have the opportunity to receive customer service or have realized their concerns in short time to meet their needs for instant satisfaction. Traditional advertising have became of lower importance as via social media we have gained greater access to what our friends think. People more emphasize on their experiences and their friends experience with brands and products than on advertisements. Thus, the concern should be on, to understand the basic behavior of people when it comes to decision making. In Advertising on the Brain it states, people have an emotional and a physical reaction, before engaging in rational thought. In other words, the process goes like, feel then react and then think. Most advertising fails to understand actions which are succeeded by positive emotions. If some kind of negative emotion are felt which may be intentional or not, then the consumer turns negative towards the brand/product.Marketers have to be intelligent towards the emotional reactions that they create, general in creating positive emotional reactions, and make it easy for people to try their brand/product, thus solidifying the positiv e emotion that makes them share about their experience with others hence there is rise of engagement advertising. In Charting a Shift from Communications to Engagements it says, The new marketing is about creating 360à ¢Ã‚ Ã‚ ° brand experiences, not messaging. Consumers should buy into to your brands ideas, not just your product. Instead of defining Reasons To Believe, there is a need to define Reasons To Be. Brands no longer are contained in any communication or campaign, but rather is understood through its many touch-points. positive touch-points should b created, and positive ROI should also b created. Thus, creating multiple positive touch-points requires a creative mind, here Marketers have to be stay strong and willing to risk failure, and ideally allow a minimum of three months to test any marketing/advertising ideas to see what works. The more we can incorporate social technology into real-life events, the more people get excited and curious about it. Marketers should be restless to incorporate promotion of art into their work. After all, art creates positive emotion, which begets action. Consumer Buying Behaviour Many decisions are being made by the consumers daily. What consumers buy where they buy, how and how much they buy, when they buy, and why they buy are the main concern of big companies to research on, they need to know about consumers buying decisions. Actual consumer purchases can be studied by the Marketers to find out what they buy, where, and how much. The answers are often locked deep within the consumers head hence learning about the whys of consumer buying behavior is a bit difficult.The main focus of the marketers is on the question that: How do consumers respond to various marketing efforts the company might use? The company that really understands how consumers will respond to different product features, prices, and advertising appeals has a great advantage over its competitors. The starting point is the stimulus-response model of buyer behavior.Marketers have to understand a lot before marketing strategies can be developed. People using consumer markets buy goods and serv ices for personal consumption. The varied consumers differ tremendously with age, income, education, tastes, and other factors. The buyers characteristics and by the buyers decision process influences the consumer behavior. Buyer characteristics include four major factors: cultural, social, personal, and psychological. Similarly, we can say that following factors can influence the Buying decision of the buyer are a. Cultural, Social, Personal,. Psychological Consumers making buying decisions mainly affect buyer. The buyer decision process consists of five stages:  need recognition, information search, evaluation of alternatives, purchase decision,  and  post purchase  behavior.  Clearly, the buying process starts long before and after the actual purchase.The entire buying process should be focused by the marketers rather than just the purchase decision which implies that consumers pass through all five stages with every purchase. Yet, in more routine purchases, consumers often skip or reverse some of these stages. A woman buying her regular brand of toothpaste would recognize the need and go right to the purchase decision, skipping information search and evaluation. Thus, we use the model in Figure because it shows all the considerations that arise when a consumer faces a new and complex purchase situation.The buyer recognizes a problem or need which is the starting of the buying process, known as need recognition. The buyer re cognizes a difference between his or her  actual  item and some  desired  item. The need can be triggered by  internal stimuli when one of the persons normal needs- hunger, thirst- raises to a level high enough to develop its craving. A need can also be triggered by  external stimuli.  At this stage, the   Ã‚  marketer need to thoroughly research consumers to find out what kinds of needs or problems arise, what brought them about, and how they can manage with the consumer related to the particular product. By gathering such information, the marketer identifies the factors that most often trigger interest in the product and can develop marketing programs that involve these factors. The emerging new influencer community is wielding significant power over the perceptions of brands and companies, the influencers to communicate are largely driven by the rapid expansion of social media channels through. The new some-bodies which were the nobodies of the past are demanding the attention of communication professionals continuous seeking engagement with targeted consumers throughout the various channels of the social web. A new level of activism is witnessed by Corporate management from an influential constituency rarely heard from in the past ordinary consumers. A large share of voice benefits in the market are gained by many of these new consumer influencers. It is due to the impact of the internet, and the technologies that bring together people who share common interests, Consumers are impacting brand equity as never before. This unnerves corporate marketing practitioners with high responsibility for brand management. To control the brand conversation, Companies feel the pressure. They may not currently have a voice in the social media space. However, establishing a presence on Twitter or Facebook without the due diligence required to make the effort worthwhile will produce few worthwhile results. Simply due to acquiring a presence on these sites for the sake of maintaining control over the brand discussion for providing the illusion of taking action which sometimes feels like taking control. Four out of five internet users visit a social network site on a monthly basis, with Facebook and Twitter causing much growth in the industry, and six out of seven US internet users now viewing online video content in a month (Radwanick, 2010). LITERATURE REVIEW Social media in marketing is a communication tool that makes the companies access to people who are interested in their product and makes it aware to people who are not aware of it. It is used as a mechanism to create a personality in a brand and earn relations with people around which helps them achieve customer loyalty with increased repeat purchases . social media is so different that it is used for the interest and the needs of the business. 2010 Social Media Marketing Industry Report 2010 says, 56% marketers use social media for 6 hours and sometimes more. The most sought after tools in social media for marketing purpose is twitter, LinkedIn, face book and blogs. While 81% plan to increase usage of blogs , 76% of whole marketers are preferring to spend at least 4 hours for advertising efforts on social media. Presently it has become extremely essential to build good consumer base, and to increase there contribution in decision making. According to Soft pedia, in US 86% of online retailers had a face book page which can increase up to 99%. 65% of these retailers are pretty active on twitter and 26% of them are planning to use twitter for plans. Social media gives marketers a voice and a way to communicate with peers, customers and potential consumers. It personalizes the brand and helps you to spread the message in a relaxed and conversational way. As far as face book is concerned 700 thousand retailers already have a face book page and around 80 thousand web portals are currently properly connected via face book.Social media provides a platform to marketers to pass on there message and idea to customers and potential customers. It customizes the brand and gives them an edge in connecting with masses. Beverage companies, automobile companies, pastry shops use social media . Pepsi ,Coke, Nokia efficiently use social media for completing there targets. involved companies in social media are Absolut Vodka have a top bartender fan page on face book,BMW a Ramp enfest Page for fans for promotion of 1-Series Road Trip.,Dunkin Donuts a micro blogging Twitter account and using it valuably,General Motors utilize online equity to reach to there consumers. Recently, marketing through social media has become an outreach activity to easily connect with customers by developing awareness of brands .though there is a shift in the trends as now its affecting sales so there is a mindset to develop a channel that is committed in engaging with the masses. As analyzed by Wet paint and Altimeter engagementdb.com, we have concluded that most of the successful companies are maintaining 7 or more accounts on social media tools or channels.Internet gives businesses with lots of methods for communicating brand to customers. The most common form is banner advertisements used for promoting opportunities on internet. Banner activities are just like print media with an added facility of clicking on banner and directly reaching to advertisement. It can do two things basically for the marketer. A visitor surfing through publishers website will look at banner ad . therefore a banner ad will help them get a customer. Actual success of banner ad is when the v isitor buys the product. Failure of clicking, advertisers think that a visitor will see the banner ad and remember it in their heads. This means the visitor pays attention to the content of a banner ad and decides to visit the site in the future, or it means that the visitor will glance on the ad but is clear and have knowledge of the product or service offered. This second effect of advertising is known as branding. Product Class congruity between a banner advertisement and website should have a there is a direct effect on consumers mind towards the website based on banner advertisement and the website considering the product class congruity. customers attitude towards brand is very essential in understanding there purchase decisions. attitude toward brand is a feeling which can be evaluate consumers hold to a specific brand .going by the traditional view made up of personal beliefs of the attitudinal objects, brand attitude gets effected by advertisements. In addition to this there is attitude towards the website. Corporate Web sites offer a variety of services such as direct selling, projecting corporate image, providing product information, generating qualified leads, dispensing electronic coupons, and handling a variety of post purchase tasks (Berthon et al., 1996; Hoffman and Novak, 1996). A lot of online traffic is generated by compan ies through active promotion of the address uniform resource locator (URL) with an online registration with search engines, hyper textual links with other Web sites and in major cases paid banner advertisements on other Web sites. This method is of huge concern now a days. Like a TV, radio or print advertisement tells the audience to call an 800 number or direct mail has the receiver mail in a reply, a banner takes the visitor to the advertisers page. when not clicked, advertisement banners definitely impacts the attitude of the visitor and help build the brands product and services offered by marketer (Elliott, 1996). banner advertisements increase the popularity. Web advertisers are dicey regarding the cost per thousand (CPM) pricing model based on impressions, that insist on payment for results or click throughs. Advertisers need to know that who is clicking and what are the reasons behind it.. Answering to this will help businesses to incorporate websites system into there marketing plans and result in better decisions based on advertising response modeling. A banner ad can be successful in many ways. methods to judge and evaluate banner ads are as follow a) Clicks/Click-throughs: It is basically the number of clicks made on that banner and judged on the basis of cost per clicks .b) Page views:, this is the number of times page has been viewed from the server Also called page impressions. It gives an idea that how many people could have seen the banner ad. though it does not give proper view of the visitors and branding campaign. The most popular way to sell banner ad space is cost per thousand impressions. c) Click-through rate (CTR): It is a ratio of page views to clicks and generally expressed as a percentage of people who viewed the page and actually click through to banner ad.. The typi cal click-through-rate is 1 percent.d) Cost per sale: This helps evaluate the amount of expenses made on getting one sale. Different means are used for this purpose. Internet cookies are used which allows to combine the actual sale made and how customer reached the site. Improving banner click-through rates are essential for the marketer and the Web site doing the advertising. As banners are priced according to click-through rates, everyone works to improve click-through rates. click-through rates will advertiser understand which Web site offers the required options. Click-through rates are affected by various factors generally ranging from 2% onwards. animation , cryptic messages , posing questions are methods to improve and understand response rates, it also includes call to action phrases, color and animation, with a sense of urgency tending to decrease response rates (Double Click and I/PRO, 1996).another way to improve response rates is targeting advertisement banners based on website requirements. banner s response rate declines due to excessive exposure, with research indicating that banner (DoubleClick and I/PRO, 1996; Modahl and MacQuiddy, 1996).According to Ofcom research most of the children have a profile on a social networking site on in ternet. The report shows that how important have social networking sites become for Briton people. 49% of internet users are in the age group of 8-17 year olds, the report also tell us that over a 22% of internet users aged 16+ have a social networking profile. According to research it is common for adults to have a profile on more than one site and more than half of social net workers say that they visit their accounts once in a day . It has been indicated by research that social media sites have changed meaning of friends. People now derive its meaning making list of people have only online friendship but never met in real life.( 2 April 2008, Social Networking: A Quantitative and Qualitative Research Report into Attitudes , Behaviors and Use Ofcom Social Networking Sites Research) Dennis A. Pitta says, use of advertising media in a traditional way have been reduced in the last few years due to online competitors. The mixture of these connections, increasing Wi-Fi and access to internet, and apart from this varies preferences of customer and ease in getting what they want has put traditional media in danger. Companies that did not exist ten years ago, like Facebook and Twitter, now overshadow traditional publishers face book and twitter who had no standing earlier now overpower the traditional media. Newspapers, for example, being most popular are now hardly existing. cities that boasting of having huge variety are now hardly having one . Even Washington Post   was so successful is now surviving by offering lesser ads and also reduced content result the jobs in newspapers are getting affected and size of the content is getting reduced. Taking example of the classic magazine,  Business week, It was sold to Bloomberg for less than $5 million (Journal of Consu mer Marketing, Volume 27, Issue 5 Dennis A. Pitta). Social media has also affected radio and television advertising as well. Though , they are not dying out completely but are giving importance to alternatives. the trend toward product in traditional ways of advertising have reached its highest point. A US television show,  Bones, featured actors driving in a Toyota Sienna minivan. One commented that the car seemed unsuited to the driver who was a single woman. Her reply was that as she was artist, the Sienna had enough space for her canvases and was still a good car to drive. In this way by twisting traditional ways traditional media is still trying to keep up there standing. For super active marketers social media acts as a breath of change. They give a two-way one-to-one marketing message. Though the manner in which described is complicated but is accurate. Social media has a strong word of mouth which can be easily given to there audience, which is the one-to-one element. Furthermore , it gives advertisers freedom to understand the consumers reaction. There is a surprising trend towards social media due to the advantages available. Therefore advertisers have shifted there budgets to social media due to wide reach as it reaches there target market more easily. Advent of a new marketing tool leads to using it to best possible level. The challenge is to understand the advantages and disadvantages of social media. Agencies are employing experts in this area and are trying to master the information resource to lots of advertisers. This has led to development of specialist companies that give new and varied approaches to advertising on social media. These companies have a better idea search engine optimization and blogging. The changes made in social media started about ten years ago with ru