Summary: The Importance Of Using Social Media In Marketing

Social media has become as a powerful new marketing tool for business in recent years in order to promote their brand and build a strong customer base. Merging social media into business marketing strategies are more of an essential than an option nowadays. Social media continues to be a crucial part of marketing strategies across diverse industries, but because of it is still relatively considered as new, the learning curve is steep. Casserly, M. (2013) reported that 60% of small business owners say they haven’t seen that their social media efforts have bring any return on investments. Although the emerging of social media can be overwhelming, frustrating and often confusing to navigate the world of social media management, but most of the

This is because for using social media in marketing strategies, somebody from the company has to be accountable for monitoring each network of the process, respond to comments in the website, answer questions or enquiries from customers and they also need to post product information that customer consider as valuable information (Barefoot & Szabo, 2010). Therefore, time investment will be a significant requirement in consideration for selecting social media as a tool to promote brands and products (Barefoot & Szabo, 2010). For those businesses without a department in managing these types of social networks, they will find it is difficult to compete in the whole market. However, simply involved in a few social media resources and just hoping to achieve huge returns is impracticable for business. According to Barefoot & Szaboo (2010), company must consider the time commitment requirement and either accept or reject this commitment as reasonable for its operations before they decide to use social media in marketing

For those companies who have used social media to boost their sales, it is very importance for the companies to defend their own trademarks and copyrights so that to avoid others from copying (Steinman and Hawkins, 2010). A company’s brands and other intellectual property are often almost as valuable as the products or services that they offer. According to Steinman & Hawkins (2010), the power of social media’s capacity to facilitate communication often on a real-time basis can help companies in promoting their brands as well as propagate copyrighted material. However, it can also cause the misuse of companies business’ trademarks and copyrights by third-party. Therefore, as an advice, companies should frequently check the use of their trademarks and copyrights when they are using social media by the way of third-party outlet or company’s own social media platforms. By doing this step, companies can make sure that those providing content through the social media outlets are not misusing their intellectual property, trademarks or copyrights. There are some way for monitoring the use of companied business trademarks and copyrights on third-party sites which are by internet tracking or screening services. Besides, this two service can also help companies to examine any social media sites for profile or user names that are identical or similar to