Social media marketing strategies and effectiveness

Social Media

Many startup companies today feel that having a strong social media presence is essential to their business success. They have a Facebook page, a Twitter account and probably more. They might integrate their social media in order to strengthen their reach to potential customers. The low cost and high visibility of social media makes it attractive to many small businesses, who can reach many more customers for very little money via social media than they could ever hope to using traditional media promotions. One industry in particular that has enjoyed success with social media is the food truck business. A hypothetical food truck might only employ social media as a means to reach customers. This paper will analyze a hypothetical Korean taco truck in order to illustrate how social media can be used to help small companies not only become established, but to grow as well.

Social Media

There are several things that make social media marketing distinct from other forms of marketing. The first is that social media is by definition social, that is to say it is a dialogue, not a lecture. While traditional media provides an opportunity for one-way communications with potential customers, social media allows for direct engagement (Kuna, 2014). This is the most important concept, because if you do a poor job on the interpersonal communication, the company is going to have trouble recovering from that. In a sense, the social nature of social media means that there is greater risk. Consider that Kuna (2014) also notes that social media is a means of reaching not only your target audience but the influencers of your target audience. This is important, because dialogues with customers are transmitted to others, and can even go viral. So engagements must be positive, in good humor and should always keep in mind that the engagement is with a customer. It is important to remember that the people who become the most engaged in social media are usually doing so in order to fulfill a social or communication need that is not available offline -- they are people who communicate a lot with others online as well (Olenski, 2014).

Our food truck also uses social media marketing to communicate basic things such as location, special deals and other content elements traditional to all forms of marketing. Using social media to fulfill this purpose works for the food truck because the audience is a niche audience. Reaching this niche audience via conventional media would be costly, and the cost of customer acquisition would be too high to be financial viable. Such a business in the past would have to rely on word of mouth. What social media does is it serves as a means to amplify that word of mouth, but with two advantages. The first is that the cost of this amplification is negligible, so the cost of customer acquisition is fairly low, low enough for a food truck where the average ticket is $9. By bringing the cost of new customer acquisition in line with the average revenue per customer the food truck finds social media to be a financially viable means of customer acquisition.

The effect is the same as word-of-mouth, but with the added benefits of amplification and timeliness. Fewer communiques are needed to reach a much larger customer base, which is a benefit over word-of-mouth. The other benefit is that the food truck has greater control over the timeliness and content of the information. There was typically very little content control over word-of-mouth, but with social media the content coming from the food truck is in writing, and is often passed along verbatim (re-tweeted, liked, etc.). Further, the communication is more timely in nature. This is important for food trucks, which typically operate in different locations and different points in time. The result is that the truck is able to communicate to its customers in real time its current location, something that is impossible with conventional media marketing and very difficult with word-of-mouth. Thus, social media has distinct advantages for this food truck over other forms of media. This has led the food truck to become expert at social media communications.

Conclusion