By: Bushra Sarwar
What is social media?
Usage of internet, social media, smart phone apps and other technology for digital communication has become part of the everyday lives of billions of people. Nowadays, social media is prevalently used by everyone. Social media is a digital platform like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin, etc., which is used by the public to share their ideas, photographs, and information in the virtual world. Other activities like blogging, social gaming, business network, advertisement, platform to promote new talent, movie review etc. even politician used social media to create awareness and reach the voters (Stephen, 2016). Even in such pandemics, social media helped a lot to spread awareness about the harmful effects of covid. As per the news article of Krishnan (2019), average time spent on social media by Indian is more than 2 hours. An average US adult spent 38 minutes/day on Facebook, while 16-24 years age group youth spent 3hours/day on social media (Metev, 2020). Metev (2020) expected more than 3 billion people are expected to join the social media network.
Social networking began as a way for friends and family to communicate. Still, it was later embraced by companies who wanted to take advantage of a typical new medium of communication to reach consumers. The strength of social media is the opportunity to communicate and exchange data with everyone on this world or several individuals at the same time. Social networking has been primarily adopted as an efficient tool that supports companies’ marketing objectives and strategies, especially in aspects related to customer interaction, management of customer relationships and communications.
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Types of Social Media Network:
Foreman, C. (2017) defined various types of social media network and its usage. Social networking can strategically strengthen two-way contact between businesses and consumers and link more customers to organisations as a result. Figure 1 presents the summary of Foreman defined social media network. Ten types of social media network are explained, and every platform has a different usage for its users. Along with social media, network examples are also given.
Social networks are communication and interaction channels that lead to growing trust among societies. Any website or online forum that allows users to express their views, thoughts, information, and promotes engagement and community building can be categorised as a social network. (Ziyadin et al., 2019).
What is Social Media Marketing (SMM)?
SMM is the use of social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Youtube, Pinterest etc.) to create your brand, to reach in the audience, to boost traffic on your website, and to reach masses at once. SMM includes sharing great content on your social media pages, listening to your followers and engaging them, reviewing your metrics, and running social media ads.
Do you ever realize, if you visit any add, shopping sites like Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra, AJIO etc., on social media, you start getting recommendations to buy or see on the same kind of advertisement on your social media platform? It is surprising why it happens? It happens due to data analytics tools. Whenever you start visiting a website, company start storing your data and using predictive analytics, start identifying your choices of things and start sending mail related to your wish list.
Fundamentals of Social Media Marketing:
Figure 3 presents the fundamentals and core pillars of social media marketing. Whenever you are in think of to publish something on social media, start looking on the five fundamental principles of SMM. Social media platform generated a lot of content writer jobs to youth. Firstly identify your strategy, define your goals and objectives, identify social media platform and decide the type of content which you want to share with the world.
Start planning and publishing the excellent content on the desired platform, engage your audience by social media tools. By using analytics, identify the preferences of the masses and start catering the same advertisement.
What is consumer psychology?
Consumer psychology is the branch of social psychology to understand the behavior of consumer. Consumer psychology is the process used by consumer to select, decide, and in purchasing of products. Consumer psychology is very important to the business world, once they understand the behavior of consumer, it would be easy for them to serve the products of their choice and desire. As per the Kotler (Marketing Management Book Author), marketing is the pull process, not push process and in this way it differs form selling. When companies start innovating the products, and selling the products as per the consumer’s choice, companies start gaining the market share and stay ahead from their competitors.
Influence of social media on consumer psychology:
As per Fitzgerald (2019), social media has become an essential tool to influence the buying behaviour of consumers. Now a day’s business world is using social media network to reach a large number of population. Studies believed that three kinds of factors affect consumer psychology: social, personal, and psychological. Individual elements are people’s interest and opinion; psychological factors are a person’s beliefs and attitude, whereas social factors are peer’s group, social group, and social media group.
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Fitzgerald presented few facts which show that social media influence consumer psychology:
- 71% population buy the things based on social media referrals (hubspot report)
- For purchasing 31% user browse social media. (marketing week.com)]
- Social media influence purchase of 47% millennial. (Deloitte)
- To increase brand familiarity 80% population uses social media. (maybe Tech)
- Shopping brands which have social media presence, their sales are 32% more. (Big Commerce).
- Mostly brands (90%) use social media for creating brand awareness. (Hootsuite)
The above facts shows that social media has strong presence and influence our decisions. Now this article is discussing the stages of consumer buying process-
Figure 4 Buying Behavior Process
Figure 4 presents the stages of consumer buying behavior process. Social media has strong presence in all the stages, which influence need identification process of customers, during exploring the products, social media sites provides lot of options to explore number of brands products which influence the decision making process of consumers. Social media influence purchase of consumer through various factors. Factors are given below:
- Create product awareness
- Originate social proof to influence other customers
- Discount offer, promotion on social media
- Brands endorsed by celebrity and advertise on social media
- Celebrity and well known person reviews
- Trend set by the influencers
The above factors show the influence of social media in the buying behaviour of consumers because these factors affect consumer psychology. Social media platforms create awareness about the products. Social proofs are significant in an online platform to make a purchase. Whenever we buy any products from social media, we always look for reviews, from the other customers who already purchased the same products and are using it. This creates a picture of satisfaction o sense of belongingness in our mind and forces us to buy the same products which have excellent reviews on social media platforms.
Sometimes, discounts, sales, offers influence or pull the consumer to make a purchase. For example Flipkart, amazon, myntra, big bazaar generate offers on the occasion of Diwali, Dussehra, or any Festivals. Similarly, big bazaar has Wednesday offers. These all offer influence consumer psychology. Similarly, celebrity advertisement and celebrity endorsement also influence our psychology.
Why consumer psychology is important?
Seventy-six per cent of customers expect businesses or brand houses to consider their needs and desires (Salesforce survey). This suggests that if a business brand doesn’t know what a customer wants until they can tell you, they’re likely to take their company elsewhere. Influential companies develop their marketing campaigns based on insights into customer behaviour. Based on their thoughts alone, they do not produce goods and marketing plans; they bring external input into the fold to figure out what consumers want and how they want it then engage with them accordingly. This is the essence of having a meaningful customer experience. For creating a loyal customer base, customer experience is significant.
Conclusion:
This article/write-up throws the light on social media and consumer psychology. The article starts with the introduction of social media, social media networks, and social media marketing. Ten types of social media network discussed in this articles which have a strong presence in the minds of consumers. Strategy, planning and publishing, engaging the customers, analyse and predict consumer behaviour is the fundamental of social media marketing. The article also discussed consumer psychology and how social media platform affects consumer psychology and influence consumer behaviour. Articles also discussed why consumer psychology is essential for the business to increase their outreach and presence in the global world. In all sense, it shows that social media has a strong presence which influences our psychology and buying decision process.
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Reference:
Foreman, C. (2017). https://blog.hootsuite.com/types-of-social-media/
Fitzgerald, R. (2019).https://connextdigital.com/how-social-media-impact-consumer-buying-behavior/
Krishnan, V. (2019). https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/how-much-time-do-indians-spend-on-social-media/article29201363.ece
Metev, D.(2020). https://review42.com/how-much-time-do-people-spend-on-social-media/
Stephen, A. T. (2016). The role of digital and social media marketing in consumer behavior. Current Opinion in Psychology, 10, 17-21.
Ziyadin, S., Doszhan, R., Borodin, A., Omarova, A., & Ilyas, A. (2019). The role of social media marketing in consumer behaviour. In E3S Web of Conferences (Vol. 135, p. 04022). EDP Sciences.