Today there is an extensive amount of social media sites online for marketers to peruse and dig for details on consumers. But why do social media sites provide so much value to marketers and businesses? Why are they so popular nowadays and massive generators of information with a high price attached to them? These are all questions that I asked myself as I made my way through the materials for the third week of the course.
Various types of blogging sites have been abundant on the web since perhaps the dawning of the web itself. Blogging sites provide information concerning consumer habits, interests, points of view, etc. But why are they not as valuable or popular to marketers as sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.?
The explosion of interest in social media sites by marketers is due to the availability of information concerning the emotions and the feelings associated with the interactions and behaviours expressed on these sites by individuals. This is what is valuable. Why else would we have so many options on these sites to 'like' something? To 'pin' something? To 'retweet' something that is of interest to us or to 'hashtag' it? These items are all becoming common, everyday terminology for us. It is literally becoming (or has always been) in our second nature to express our likes and dislikes, our preferences, and our tastes.
Have you ever wondered why there isn't a 'dislike' button on Facebook? The answer is because marketers are simply not interested in what you do not like. Knowing what you like is much more valuable to enterprises that are trying to attract your business.
It is in our human nature to have tastes, to want to express these tastes, to share them, and to become socially competitive based on our personal tastes. The internet has encapsulated this experience with the abundance of social networking sites on the web today.
So what's next for this? How about a machine that obtains information from your activities online and runs this information against a database containing associations based on likes and dislikes linked to text, words, and activities online? Will we have the potential to predict human behaviour, particularly buying behaviour, and perhaps even create it? Is this what the capabilities of big data will provide us with?
Are marketers solely concerned with what consumers 'like'? They certainly should not be. Likes and pins are an easy way to obtain data on consumer interests, but we are still missing a great wealth of information here, with dislikes and other actions associated with emotions that should be represented in social media sites. With the prevalence of big data we will be able to gain even more insight on consumer interests based on emotions.
Emotions drive buying behaviour. There must be a better way to model and encapsulate the emotional experience online. The social media sites of the present time are simply the beginning of a new era.
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