Social Media Marketing Is Not A Fad

Heard of social marketing, social networking, or social media but not sure what it is and if it is a fad or not.  Social Media Marketing (SMM) is not just another online marketing acronym – it encompasses a whole range of marketing and networking strategies worthy of it’s own department in any business. Professionals, who have been in the industry for some time, heard “SMM” references become commonplace in 2006 when the term was officially coined at Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide.  It describes the company’s efforts to leverage all the links and marketing value derived from socializing and business networks.

With that said, lets take a look at SMM and if social media marketing is not a fad. So far – SMM has made quite an impact over the past couple of years as shown in some stats below, provided by Socialnomics.net

• By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers and 96% of Gen Y have joined a social network
• Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
• 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
• Years to Reach 50 million Users:  Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months…iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
• If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest between the United States and Indonesia

These numbers alone are enough to show that social media marketing is not a fad.

According to WhitePaperSource.com, which produced the ‘Social Media Marketing Industry Report‘ white paper, showing SMM trends based on responses from about 700 marketing professionals. Of those surveyed, 88% use social media for business, of which Twitter, blogs, LinkedIn and Facebook are the most popular.

The stats themselves show why…

Thefutuerbuzz.com reports that there are more than 133,000,000 web site blogs in existence.
Facebook, on the other hand has over 175 million users and received 30 billion page views in March alone. Twitter’s also broken into the billions, where users have tweeted more than 1.1 billion times to date.

The Future of Social Media Marketing:

International markets and new technology are two factors that have already changed the scope of SMM. Take China – the country already has the largest blogger community in the world, (about 50 million bloggers.) Social networks are picking up steam as more users adapt to web2.0 functionality and appearance. Sites such as Xiaonei and mop.com are already touted as China’s version of Facebook and MySpace respectively. To date, Xianoei had about 70 million users.

On the backend (yet very much on the forefront of influencing trends and the evolution of human socialization) is staggering new technology designed to recognize faces (Biometric Face Recognition technology), streamline logins via an open authentication protocol (OpenID), and small circuit boards (like the Arduino) that enable inanimate objects to Tweet.

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