“Social media is only going to be persuasive and become such a critical factor in the success of failure in business.”
Today, word of mouth is changed by social networking site and internet. We share things to more people today because of social networking sites and internet, news spread faster, and people will gain more insight because the tendency to read more.
With the ability to connect to massive crowd, a person has the ability to impact other people and influence them in making decisions. In 2007, 78% of people trust the recommendations of other consumers; while only 14% of people trust advertisement. But now that number has increased as in 2009, 90% of people trust the recommendations of other consumers more. (Nielsen, 2009).
It is great to see that today, more and more companies are embracing all types of social networking to get most of people’s attention. But, we can’t treat social media platform like conventional media. One must be engaged and be active. We can’t just put information like we did in conventional media to social media platform. It works differently. Participation is the fundamental of social media, because the whole point of social media is to share and create information for others to participate, not just to spread and read it.
In order for the social networking to be effective, one must engage and interact with them. Danny Oei Wirianto, online marketing entrepreneur said that one of the most common mistakes marketers made in this regard was to create a Facebook fan page simply to collect as many friends as possible, while failing to really communicate with those people.
Social media is not a replacement for conventional media, thus we can’t treat it like that. Like it or not, the future will shift towards more sharing and creating content. Content is the new democracy. But because there are still people that have not engaged in this medium, social media has not revealed its full power yet.