If you've been transfixed by political events both at home and in the US during the past six months, you may have been thinking about how dramatically social media has altered society over the past decade. You may also have been contemplating how much our world could still be changed by the channels we use to connect and interact every day.

From fake stories promoted on social media, to the “Facebook echo chamber” effect, the science behind how social media affects elections, referendums and political climates is in its infancy, but current furores do reveal just how powerful such platforms are. Current events are now shining a light on the extent to which social media permeates everything we do; from the brunches we Instagram, to the new trainers we're influenced to order online.

Within the world of marketing, this power is even starker. Social media totally changed the game for marketers and over the past decade. The medium has dragged and corralled brands into completely new relationships with customers, clients and the public.

This process has been an evolution – and one which is ongoing. As platforms like Twitter and Facebook make updates, shift focus and work to monetise platforms while maintaining user experience, the way users interact with them – and the brands which use them – continually shifts.

In 2001, social media as we understand it today began to steadily colonise the web. From the launch of Wikipedia, to the 2003 invention of MySpace, these early years laid the groundwork for huge, closed systems for digital interaction. “The Facebook” launched in 2004, climbing exponentially from 100 million users in 2008, to an astounding 1.8 billion in Q3 2016. YouTube and Reddit followed in 2005, with Twitter hot on their heels in 2006. Today the 140 character-based platform has 317 million active monthly users.

The 2010s saw the launch of more multimedia oriented platforms; Vine, Snapchat, Pinterest and Instagram brought images and video to social media, prompting established social media titans Facebook and Twitter to embrace multimedia content too.

Today social media dominates activity online. In 2015, social media accounted for over a quarter of time spent online, with the average web user racking up an hour and forty minutes of social media time daily.

Once upon a time, the billboard, the radio, the newspaper and the television screen were the places to put advertising right under consumers' noses. Today, it's social media. Where consumers go, brands must follow if they want to get noticed. Which is why social now seriously runs the show when it comes to building brands. The ways in which the medium impacts advertisers and marketers are endless, from the everyday “big picture” pragmatic, to the incredibly nuanced and subtle. But there are some crucial game-changers which have dramatically altered marketing in general over the past decade...

The customer has a voice

Advertising and marketing were once a one-way street. However many focus groups you interviewed, marketing was delivered to consumers and consumers had no way of responding to it.

Social media changed all that.

Today consumers can shout their message right back to brands. Social channels allow customers to complain directly in full sight, praise a product, share brand-owned content they love with their followers and tell brands exactly what they think of them. Today marketing is a two-way street, forcing brands to learn more about their demographics and invest more in direct, personal interactions in order to generate the positive presences they need to sell.

Brands have personalities

These personal interactions with consumers have forced brands to develop personalities. While advertisers have always positioned brands to appeal to specific demographics, with more one-to-one interactions to field, these brands have almost become “people”. Honing and maintaining these personalities across all platforms is now a key part of digital marketing strategies.

Social is a discovery tool

While Google and alternative search engines are still used to discover products and services, social media is now a major digital discovery tool.

Social media apps on smartphones cause many users to never leave the world of a particular network to search for the content or products they want, while relatively new features like Facebook's newsfeed bring ever more content to users' social accounts, removing the need for them to exit the network. This change is ongoing and forces brands to establish strong, effective presences within the platforms in order to be seen.

Peers are the most trustworthy sources

With so much digital advertising bombarding consumers, a growing level of scepticism and savviness has led audiences to apply their own mental “ad block” to out-and-out promotional content. Instead, peer reviews in the form of posts by friends, shares by connections and blogs by influencers are the content we trust.

As a result, today's smartest brands are focussing less on creating traditional brand-owned content and are instead working to generate real, positive content from “real people”. User generated content, such as Instagram posts by popular bloggers which feature a brand's products, or a positive mention from a widely followed Twitter account, is highly prized by digital marketers.

 

By Andrew Foyle, co-founder and chief executive at Miappi

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