How important is social media to marketing your products?

[Rafael]

[Alistpr]

Extremely. The only market that doesn't use social media is 60 and up and even that is now growing.

[Mo T]

Hi,

From practical sense, social media (I believe you refer to "Internet Social Media) is very important to market your product. There are some reasons why social media is strategic for your products:

- It is a cheaper way to reach your audience. I would argue that social media is even better than word of mouth, or perhaps we could say that social media is the advance mode of word of mouth.

- Social media is multi-dimensional. Unlike word of mouth, social media provides an opportunity to cram all marketing communication elements into one. For instance, let us take facebook as an example. When you promote your product via facebook, people can add your account and have a chat w/your CS. Thefore, you save money on background utilities such as special software to communicate w/them.

FB could also carry your Tv ad. Just put a youtube link on your FB, then people could just see your add.

FB also functions as a place to spread word of mouth. The "Wall" in FB provides ALMOST the same experience w/word of mouth.

You can also insert your catalogue in your FB. Therefore saving enormous amount of money on printing.

and many other things.

However, there is something I would like to note here. Communicating your product is one thing, keeping the quality of your product is another thing. You might want to invest 85 percent of your time by increasing the quality of your product drastically rather than busy thinking about communicating it.

Last but not least, HONESTY and TQM are better than the best marketing communication available.

Good companies are sought. They don't always come out to find their customers. The people will find them. The only thing they need to do is to gain the best RnD available and to solve customers complaint efficiently.

That is some of my thought. I hope you don't mind.

[ENDA]

A very interesting question indeed and also very current. You asked how important it is and my answer to that is not that important at all despite all the hype.

I have about 10 websites and 3 of those are on the first page of google and I didn't use any form of Social Media. I am not saying that it doesn't work and I agree that it most likely depends on the audience you are trying to reach.

I tried it on 2 of my websites and have yet to see much of a difference but will keep watching.