Cancino, Rafael S.2014-28337

Social Media and Marketing: A Statistical Perspective

The recent onset of the Internet age has paved the way to the development of one of the most

popular forms of media nowadays, which is social media. As more and more people gain access to the

Internet and eventually become members of the biggest social networking sites, like Facebook and

Twitter, one thing is for sure, social media becomes more equipped than ever with data sets regarding a

multitude of topics like popularity indices of politicians prior to a particular election, for example. As

most of these sites are free to the public and is open to anyone who wishes to utilize these networks, these

sites manage to maintain their ever-expanding systems through advertising. Just like advertising in print,

advertising in social media requires statistical evaluation to minimize cost and maximize the efficiency

and the impact it has on whatever is being advertised.

Statistics provides information regarding the users who, for this matter, are consumers of the

products or businesses in need of advertising. For example, information on the interests of users based on

the pages they visit on social media are evaluated in order to narrow down the target audience of the

advertisements. Since one of the main goals of marketers is to enable their products to gain more

exposure, statistics would be able to illustrate the general distribution of people who, for example, are

looking for new pizza places near where they live. With this information on hand, businesses may be

enabled to reach their target consumers more efficiently. Also, marketers are informed on what form of

advertising is more cost-effective, or when is the best time to publish advertisements to suit the interests

of social media users. Different forms of advertisements on social media, like videos or infographics,

yield varying Return on Investments (ROIs) depending on the type of product and other factors, such as

timeliness. Marketers who have already used social media for advertising for more than 3 years report an

increase in sales, according to a survey by Social Media Examiner (Stelzner, 2014).

With all of these in mind, it can be concluded that social media possesses significant potential

among marketers and their respective businesses, especially because of the continuous growth of these

social networks. To utilize social media in the best possible way, marketers must employ various

statistical evaluations before the advertisement in order to maximize the advertisement’s potential and

after the advertisement in order to gauge the effect of social media marketing on their particular

businesses.

References:

Mack, S. (n.d.). Importance of Statistics in Advertising. Retrieved June 18, 2015, from http://smallbusiness.chron.com/importance-statistics-advertising-66218.html

Stelzner, M. (2014). 2014 Social Media Marketing Industry Report. Retrieved June 18, 2015, from http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/SocialMediaMarketingIndustryReport2014.pdf