Changes in Social Media and the Effect on Marketing The fact is social media is changing. With the rise of social networking websites and other social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter and individual blogs has grown massively during recent years. We will look at the impact of how social media platforms impact businesses and consumers and who has the control of the power on social media the user or the business. Every day you go on one of the many platforms of social media it has some slight changes, in 2018 Mark Zuckerberg announced that he had one big change for Facebook, and this was because he wanted the time you spent on Facebook to be spent well (Zuckerberg, 2018). Zuckerberg’s changes to the Facebook news feed meant that you should see more friends and family post than public content from the media, brands and businesses as he said it should encourage more meaningful interactions between people. The reason behind this change was down to research Facebook had done found their users wanted to see more from family and friends than content from brands (Siu, 2018). With these changes through Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc it would be foolish to think that as the user we should choose not to want to participate in the public discourse if we are unhappy with the apparent current prevalence of social media within society. Social media has increasingly become the norm for many people around the world today, allowing them to access each other to, regardless of geographical borders, religious or pollical beliefs or underlying ideologies. With social medias influence becoming increasingly part of everyday society it has become almost unrealistic to imagine any individual failing to interact and participate with it on at least some level on a regular basis (Friske, 2018). When social media was in its infancy most analysts and most users saw it as a way to connect with friends online however its power was very quickly identified cap and capitalised upon by industries eventually allowing it to evolve into the main broadcasting channel of choice for many brands. Brand have taken control by using the girl or boy from next door to give a more genuine experience with their audiences providing meaningful engagement with target markets (Eckstein, 2019). Global stats show that there are more than 3 billion social media users and this is up 9% year on year (Chaffey, 2019), currently it is pretty apparent that social media is here to stay, with the number of active users growing more and more each day with more people wanting to stay connected with their friends, family and fellow coworkers in place of more traditional ways. It’s important that businesses and consumers stay on top of these numbers, so they understand how they need to change their marketing strategy (Rosen, 2016). The world has seen its fair share of social media influence and the growth of social media influencers as a marketing tool. One such example of this change in marketing strategy was the ford motor group who in the late 2000s began utilising this influencer power when attempting to break into the compact car market relaunching their fiesta brand in the continental US. By employing 100 “influencers” as long-term test subjects over the course of six months. This strategy led to some serious example of their power with 7 million reported views of videos on YouTube including review content, and a quarter of a million views on Flickr as well as countless other above expectations results across multiple platforms. This led to higher than expected awareness ratings of nearly 60% following marketing surveys and ultimately 11,000 vehicle reservations in the first three months. This itself led to the fiesta becoming the fastest selling vehicle in fords range and in the domestic market at the time for three consecutive years only being out performed by perennial high selling vehicles in the SUV and pickup market. All of these unprecedented sale results were driven largely in part due to the utilisation of the emerging trend of social media amongst ford target audience for this product (Monty, 2013). The importunacy of a social media influencer to businesses and consumers is to help establish some credibility within a specific industry. An influencer has a large audience and can help persuade others by their virtue of their authenticity and reach (Newberry, 2019). The original influencer market came from celebrity endorsements, but today in the digital world, social content creators with niche audiences can often been seen collaborating with industry. These brand collaborations can be to promote a product, service or even a campaign. These are now known as “social media influencers” and can offer more to brands than celebrity endorsements. These people have a loyal and engaged group of followers over their social media (Newberry, 2019). In earlier traditional ways or marketing platforms such as the radio, tv adverts or printed adverts in newspapers or magazines were very costly but now with social media and social media influencers, companies and brands can now connect with their target audience for free there only cost is now time. When using these social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc., there marketing costs are now lower (Khanna, 2018). The impact of social media marketing is having a tremendous impact with businesses and market as the growth and performance are taking place at an astronomical rate, this has helped the business developing tactics and has shown an opportunity for consumers to grab the attention of their customers while instantaneously building their brand image (Khanna, 2018). Today brands are always looking for new ways to improve their social media game, they are using social media platforms to get closer to their target audience. Customer relationship management experts are now using bots to help interact with customers as well as to get data about their customers’ opinions and behavioural patterns, this also allows the brands to predict their customers’ behaviour and anticipate their needs (Megan, 2019). There has been countless benefits from social media marketing one of these is having better customer service as this allows the business to respond to any customer query almost instantly and assure the customer they are dealing with their query (Khanna, 2018). In many cases the LGBTQ consumers, have a two-person household, each member with a higher than average education and these also have a higher average income. Many have no children to raise, so many have money left over at the end of each month more than heterosexual counterparts with families (Kennedy, 2019). Kennedy continues to say that the vast majority of markets are heterosexuals who may profess having no problems with the LGBTQ community but who are actually uncomfortable about the idea of designing advertising and marketing programs to attract them as patients, clients or customers (Kennedy, 2019). On one hand you have companies openly defending LGBTQ rights, and these are reaping in the benefits as LGBTQ consumers are among the most loyal and they reward companies that have got their back, this even means if they must spend more on there shopping basket. If you consider in the US alone the spending power of the LGBTQ community is calculated in the region of $800 billion a year (Zappulla, 2017). Brands such as adidas are embracing the LGBTQ community by realising a rainbowflag makeover on one of their iconic Stan Smith trainers and devoting a portion of its sales to Homeless LGBT teen charity based in Oregon (Zappulla, 2017). Works Cited Chaffey, D., 2019. Smart Insights. [Online] Available at: www.smartinsights.com/social-media-marketing/social-mediastrategy/new-global-social-media-research/ [Accessed 26 October 2019]. Eckstein, M., 2019. Buffer. [Online] Available at: https://buffer.com/library/social-media-engagement [Accessed 25 October 2019]. Friske, T., 2018. Medium. 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