Social Media Marketing Can be Cost-effective for Businesses

Social media marketing is affordable and
can enhance your online presence, build
community engagement, and increase leads
and conversions.

Social Media Marketing Can be Costeffective
for Businesses
Social media marketing can bring amazing results for your business provided it is implemented
correctly. You can use social media to start conversations and build a community organically. It has
become a platform for users to interact, create or share their ideas and participate in social networking.
A company’s online reputation depends on social media influence. This means that the more influential
you are on social media, the better your reputation is. Engaging with social media influencers allows you
to increase brand awareness, create brand advocates and increase page rank. You can use social media
strategies on sites such as Facebook and Instagram to target specific demographics. Small businesses
can use a lesser budget while maintaining a wide customer reach by effectively using strategies based
on behavioral data and segmentation.
Social media is equal to word of mouth advertising and in the United States alone, companies’
investment in social media is expected to exceed $17 billion by 2019. But the problem is how and where
to spend the money to maximize the results. UConn assistant professor of operations and information
management Jing Peng and three colleagues have studied the issue, and discovered that depending on
the popularity of your company's social media message the SEO strategies should be different.
According to a study, "Network Overlap and Content Sharing on Social Media Platforms,” published in
the Journal of Marketing Research in August 2018, authored by professors Ashish Agarwal from the
McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas-Austin, and Kartik Hosanagar and Raghuram
Iyengar, both of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, marketing communication
through platforms like Twitter can enable firms to reach new customers through users’ connections
and drive demand for their products. It is vital to have a clear understanding of the factors that drive
sharing. Realising how the inclination of senders is linked to their network overlap can be valuable
information for selecting the users best able to spread content.
The research suggests that the network connection between two users can influence their sharing
propensity in the following ways.
• A high number of followees indicate that the sender and the receiver have the same interests
and also have similar propensity to share a particular piece of content. A high number of
common followers and common mutual followers between the sender and receiver could
signify that their other followers share similar interests or tastes.
• A huge number of common followers and common mutual followers suggest higher redundancy
in the information received by the audience and deter a user from sharing the content because
he/she is looking for uniqueness.

• A receiver may respond a little differently to a message depending on whether he or she shares
a weak or strong tie with his or her audience that may lead to differential effects of followers.
The researchers investigated nine brands listed by Fortune magazine as the top Fortune 500 companies
using social media and found that 6.4 percent of social media shares have more than one co-sender. To
test their findings, the researchers collected additional data set from Digg, a large online social news
aggregation website. Analysis of the results gave the following information:
• Network overlap plays an important role in content sharing on online social networks. The
inclination of a receiver to share content depends on three measures of network overlap, i.e.
followees, followers and mutual followers. This signifies that each measure contributes
independently to the sharing propensity. Sharing propensity increases more with common
followers than with common mutual followers.
• Targeting senders while taking into account their network overlap, saves between 35 and 70
percent of the time to spread the content to a fixed percentage of users.
• The impacts of common followers and common mutual followers are moderated by the
newness of content. The impacts are positive only when the content is relatively new, and not
shared by many others. If it is already widely shared, the positive effects decrease, implying that
users' need for unique content is likely influencing their decision.
The researchers suggest that user targeting can be improved by drawing on the users’ network overlap
with followers. According to them, “seeders” or authors/users who spontaneously share content with
high network overlap should be chosen only when the content is not popular. The popularity of content
may vary across different brands that want to target different sets of seeders. And, for a really costeffective
marketing campaign, you need to understand what leads to effective content sharing.
Compared to traditional advertising, social media is nearly free, offers unlimited reach, and is available
on the web round the clock. Two major advantages of social media marketing are: consumers are not
always aware that you are advertising to them and will be more receptive; and social media advertising
is brief, targeted and niche. Social media marketing enables you to advertise to those who are most
likely to buy your products or services. When done right, social media marketing would prove to be
really cost-effective. Even paid social media campaigns such as Facebook Ads are cheaper than other ad
options such as search engine ads. Every business needs social media to enhance their online presence
and build community engagement.
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