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How Has the Rise of Social Media Impacted Marketing?

Braden Rainey

University of Arkansas at Little Rock

RHET 1312: Composition II

Prof. Emma White

March 5, 2023
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How Has the Rise of Social Media Impacted Marketing?

Introduction

With the rise of social media, advertisers have a huge advertising resource due

to the dominance of social media platforms. With social media being the apps that most

people spend a majority of their time on, the amount of potential consumers is through

the roof. Overall, advertising on social media has given advertisers a huge audience for

them to promote their businesses, it has given advertisers a much easier way to

advertise compared to decades past, and the power of advertising through influencers

gives businesses a boost as well.

Social Media Audience

With the 4 biggest social media platforms in the world having over 2 billion

monthly active users, advertisers have a very wide audience made up of many different

demographics that they can promote their business to (Statista, 2023). In fact, YouTube

and its 2.5 billion users is so crucial to its revenue, that it’s one of the main ways that it

makes money due to advertisers putting a lot of money into bidding wars so that they

can place an ad on their service, like most companies do with advertisers (Foundr,

2023). If you’re a YouTube user, then you most likely have already figured out how

important advertising is to them considering the fact that for a video that’s 10 minutes or

longer you will get 2 unskippable ads before the video starts, with the possibility of

getting multiple ads scattered throughout the rest of the video, which is dependent on

the videos CPM rate.

The Difference Between Advertising Then vs. Now

Social Media has given advertisers a new way to connect with consumers.

Nowadays, we have platforms like TikTok, which gives businesses the idea to promote
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their businesses through short, comedic videos as a way to get users to engage the

same way they would with a normal TikTok video. As social media use has evolved,

companies have added departments that are solely dedicated to creating marketing

strategies on social media platforms (Redshark, 2022). This form of advertising allows

companies to come off as more relatable to consumers and strictly appeal to their

interests. For example, a lot of companies use Twitter to retweet consumers’ opinions

about their products and even listen to their criticism in order to keep an open line of

communication with their consumers (Whiting, Deshpande, 2014). The use of cookies

and algorithms in these apps help with this as well by giving users personalized ads.

This is drastically different from the way companies promoted their business in past

decades by way of newspapers and television commercials, which was a much more

generalized way of advertising.

The Power of Influencers

Creating sponsorships with influencers is one of the most profitable ways of

advertising. This is mostly due to the fact that influencers hold a lot of power to their fans

and they are so loyal that they will trust the influencer’s endorsement of the

company/product. Usually, already-established companies will look to work with any

“popular” influencer with at least a few hundred thousand followers; however, when

companies work with influencers that have a following well into the ten millions, the

exposure already naturally increases due to the fact that their following is bigger, but

these type of influencers are looked at as superstars with very loyal fanbases, which

makes this partnership even more beneficial for companies. Some companies will

choose to look past an influencer’s following because they believe it to be more

beneficial to align themselves with someone that has the same interests (Deepa,

Deshmukh, 2013).
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Conclusion

In conclusion, advancements in technology have led to improvements in how

companies can reach consumers, especially with the way apps use our data to keep

track of our interests. With the power that influences hold on their audiences, their

partnership with companies can be very lucrative. Overall, these modernized ways of

advertising with social media have made advertising a lot easier than it has ever been.
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References

Deepa, N and Deshmukh, Sagar. (2013). Social Media Marketing: The Next Generation of

Business Engagement. International Journal of Management Research and Reviews, Vol. 3,

Issue. 2, 2461-2648. https://www.proquest.com/docview/1425248026?accountid=14482&pq-

origsite=primo&forcedol=true

Whiting, Anne and Deshpande, Anant. (2014). Social Media Marketing: A Myth or a Necessity.

The Journal of Applied Business and Economics, Vol. 16, Issue. 5, 74-81.

https://www.proquest.com/docview/1647789148?pq-origsite=primo

O’Connell, Taylor. (2022). How Social Media Has Changed the Marketing World. REDSHARK.

https://www.redsharkdigital.com/news/how-social-media-has-changed-the-marketing-

world#:~:text=Social%20media%20marketing%20has%20opened,an%20expansion%20of

%20business%20sales.

Dixon, S. (2023). Global social networks ranked by number of users 2023. Statista.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-of-users/

Chan, Nathan. (2023). How Much Do YouTube Ads Cost? A Beginner’s Pricing Breakdown.

Foundr. https://foundr.com/articles/marketing/youtube-ads-cost-breakdown