There’s a lot of talk about social media in marketing these days — in an incredibly short amount of time it’s moved from something that “those kids were doing” to a clever marketing device for up and comers to a viable marketing tool for all consumer markets and finally to a tool that’s used heavily within the majority of B2B business markets.
I distinctly remember back in the mid 90s when people were predicting that the internet was a fad. It didn’t have much real use, and clearly would just be something that the tech savvy and kids played around with. Obviously those predictions were about as wrong as it’s possible to be — the internet is the biggest and most fundamental change in society since the industrial revolution. It’s changed everything from how we communicate, get our news, watch movies and television, to how we find things to how we shop.
Social media is kind of like that. I’m not saying it’s as revolutionary a thing as the internet itself, but I am saying that it’s not a fad, and it’s here to stay. Whether it will be the Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter that we know today, or some newer and better and hotter social network, social media is going to continue to grow from the already frightening behemoth that it is today.
Before you dismiss social media, watch this and see what you’re giving up
Before you dismiss social media from your online marketing strategy, take a few minutes to check out this video. It’s over a year old now, which means in internet years it’s horribly out of date — just about every statistic in there is even more heavily in favor of social media and the internet now. Facebook’s population would no longer make it the fourth largest country in the world, for example — it’d be the third.