In the beginning, social media was just supposed to be an outlet for people to connect on. What started out as a channel for sharing photos, music, personal thoughts, and chatting with friends, soon transformed into something completely different. Flash forward two decades later and social media is now one of the biggest marketing tools, if not the most powerful marketing tool for business and brands. Social media has made a revolutionary change for businesses by giving them endless opportunities and tools to market their products and services to a much larger audience (AKA: The Internet). With the use of social media, businesses are able to meet their targets and change their strategies to meet the consumer needs more specifically. Keeping in mind the increasing number of people turning to find what they need online, the digital marketing trend is nowhere near finished.

Here are the top 5 ways that social media has changed media marketing forever:

1. Social Media Allows for Specific Ad Targeting

With the power of social media, we can target our ideal client. Advertising online allows businesses to target specific demographics, interests, behaviors, and other important information to reach their perfect customers. Targeted ads collect and analyze online activity over various apps and use this data to inform the type of ads a user is shown, hoping that it will attract them based on their previous likes.

2. Using UGC to Share your Brand

UGC is the latest tool in social media to help generate buzz towards a brand. It refers to any kind of content created by a user that isn’t necessarily an employee of the brand, but hired to make content such as photos, videos, reviews, and comments in exchange for money or the product or service they are reviwing. Brands can leverage UGC to create authentic and engaging content that resonates with their audience. This
type of advertising has been encouraging other users to create and share content related to a brand or product.

3. Real Time Customer Service

With our phones right at our fingertips, we have social media at our disposal. Which gives businesses an advantage, you can get in contact with your customers or clients at anytimes. Social media gives us an outlet to build relationships and engage in conversations. Which creates loyalty which leads to building a strong online community. Also it gives you the advantage to be present for feedback, whether that be good, or bad,
you can get back to a customer at the speed of light using social media.

4. The relationship between marketing and data

Social media has completely changed the relationship between marketing and data. Data is collected throughout many streams online such as brand awareness, audience segmentation, performance tracking, promotion planning, and content distribution strategy. This also has to do with the algorithm that tracks our likes and searches that determine what we want to see on our pages.

5. The Rise of E-Commerce
Online shopping has always been on the rise, but now you can shop directly on a social media application. Instagram, facebook, pinterest, tiktok you name it and you’ll be able to shop. In a recent Forbes article, Jason Goldberg exemplifies how the numbers are increasing because consumers are discovering new products via digital experiences rather than in physical stores. In a recent estimate, “61% of all US sales are now influenced by digital experiences, and projects that 70% of all sales will be digitally influenced by 2027.” As you can see from this graph, consumers have surpassed the estimated projection of e-commerce usage. So we can only expect e-commerce to keep growing and being driven by different discoveries in social media platforms. The future is unknown but e-commerce is beyond promising.