A Brief History of Social Media
Social media’s affect and reach has risen exponentially over the past 20 years. The origins of social media were in 1997 when blogging became popular. Friends reunited which started in 2000 was perhaps the first memorable online social media portal to achieve prominence.
Then in 2004 Facebook was created. From 2005 onwards, social media directly influences society and our psychology.
Social media is the stickiest media platform. The general public spend a lot more time engaged on social media channels than any other media channel. It has been suggested that the reason is the immediate reward of the channels, e.g. likes and shares, such as those found on Facebook and Twitter. Social media platforms intensify self-involvement. Studies have shown that 30-40% of real-life conversations are self-involved. This compares to up to 80% of conversations on social media.
Benefitting From Self-Involvement
What does self-involvement mean? An individual uploads a picture of themselves and a message suggesting what has changed – lost weight – new haircut – new dress, onto a visual social media channel. Their purpose is to receive instant feedback through likes, shares and comments.
Brands and companies are able to benefit from this behaviour on social media channels, now known as Social Media Marketing. There are a lot of ways brands may use this marketing strategy. Proactively via campaigns, or reactively by responding to tagged photographs and posts. Coca Cola benefited from social media in 2011 with their “Share a Coke” marketing campaign which became a major viral success on many social media platforms. Immediately people were posting pictures with a bottle of Coca-Cola with their name on it via social media, resulting in 500,000 photos shared and approximately 25 million new facebook followers. Social media marketing at its best!
How to use Social Media to help your Marketing
Massive impact viral successes such as Coca-Cola can be difficult for smaller brands or individuals to achieve, but coming up with a social media marketing strategy to engage your client base is not so hard. As with the aforementioned Coca-Cola campaign, having new/existing clients post a photo of themselves with the promotional item on a social media channel is a recommended way to increase engagement and awareness of a brand. For small businesses, using Promotional Merchandise or Printed Garments would be a great way at getting your brand on social media.
As mentioned in our blog post ‘9 Ways printed promotional products can save your business’, the promotional product can be extremely beneficial, but it has to be useful, attractive and desirable for the customer. If the product is the right choice, clients will post pictures of their new personalised items on social media, raising your brand awareness, plus they will get their instant gratification from likes and shares, which will improve how many people see your product!Garment Printing are market leaders in all printed products.
We have helped thousands of companies increase their brand recognition by supplying them with printed garments and promotional merchandise. Take a look at our products or case studies to see how we can help you!
