The surge of social media has significantly impacted the buying decisions of consumers. Whether it's Facebook, Twitter, or MySpace, each one has pocketed critical users strength to influence the business decisions of consumers. The peer pressure, group affiliations, and overall cumulative network ripple effect of Internet usage have been primary influencers to branding and consumer marketing over Web in these years. Digital marketing, what's a decade before hinged on only the e-commerce concept, is now in full steam to drive online retailing by engaging the collaborative potential of social media. The way the social collaboration is shaping up across broad-based social networking sites would decide tomorrow's business modeling and the success of online business.
According to Pew Research, social networking site usage grew 88 percent among Internet users aged 55-64 between April 2009 and May 2010. This indicates that not only the youth brigade, but the senior citizens as well have boarded the social media train. Nobody wants to miss the most exciting journey either as an observer or as an active participant. An NPD Group report reveals that in 2009, social gamers bought $2.2 billion in virtual goods, and this would increase to $6 billion by 2013.
On enterprise level, companies have also joined the social media bandwagon, at least in the form of a blog site. Almost all companies those have an online presence have striven to push their collaboration quotient a little higher either by joining a social media or engaging themselves in smart product evangelism by creating a blog site. According to comScore, 22 percent of Fortune 500 companies now have a public-facing blog that has at least one post in the past 12 months. Many product companies have gone a little further by engaging technology bloggers to promote their products.
According to a report published by Nielsen, “Three of the world’s most popular brands online are social-media related (Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia) and the world now spends over 110 billion minutes on social networks and blog sites.” The same report states, “For the first time ever, social network or blog sites are visited by three quarters of global consumers who go online, after the numbers of people visiting these sites increased by 24% over last year. The average visitor spends 66% more time on these sites than a year ago, almost 6 hours in April 2010 versus 3 hours, 31 minutes last year.”
In fact, social media have a great future ahead. From mere relation building to surveys to cumulative network effect, social media will decide whether an online business will succeed or not.
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