Question

discuss the role of social media in an IMC program

Answer 1

Social media is changing the landscape of marketing communication. Growing use and popularity of social media tools like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, Flicker, Digg, Del.icio.us, Foursquare and others have compelled organisations' use of social media as an integrated marketing communication tool. Consumers are making conversation on these platforms.

Social Media enables customer to talk to one another, which is an extention of traditional word-of-mouth communication (Mangold & Faulds, 2009). The role of social media giving customer to communicate to one another is unique from traditional marketing communication

social media is a dynamic concept that precludes a stable and static approach to IMC, as it is constantly affected by technological innovation and other forces of globalization. Social media includes blogs, mini-blogs such as Twitter, social networking forums such as Facebook and MySpace, business-specific community forums, and file-sharing sites such as YouTube, with all types of social media potentially providing advantage or disadvantage to organizations depending on how effectively they are managed. Social media is changeable and far-reaching, with organizations forced to adopt a consistent and proactive approach to social media management.

social media is integral to IMC for three, core reasons; these are that it provides a channel for firms to communicate with consumers, consumers to communicate with one another, and consumers to communicate with businesses. Firms then make use of social media, ideally, to monitor brand reputation, promote brand loyalty, and generally assess the opinions and perspectives of consumers. As part of an IMC strategy, social media marketing is an organizational initiative that communicates with target markets in order to develop or support a unified, customer-focused message and achieve various marketing objectives.

small business owners, in particular, lag behind larger firms in their use of social media, still relying on traditional and mass media communications; this is despite the evidence highlighting that social media is a cost-effective means of reaching a wide audience. The authors highlight that small businesses resist social media for a wide spectrum of reasons, including a perceived lack of interpersonal connection between firm and consumer, but are charged to integrate social media into their marketing initiatives if they are to remain viable in the global economy.