Social Media In The Digital Age

As stated by Killian and McManus, social media is dominating the consumer conversations as well as pop culture. The new developing consumer environment has resulted in brand managers seeking ways in which to promote their brands with minimizing the possible negative impacts. This transition into the digital age has come with several difficulties. The difficulties are suggested to be a reflection of companies not being accustomed to consumers having a platform by which they are able to express their thoughts in a mass medium (Killian and McManus, 2015). The early part of the 21st century came with an exponential growth in new media, this new media having two key characteristics, digital and interactive (Winer, 2009). Within this new digital

Consumers are turning away from traditional media, such as TV, radio and magazines and are looking to social media to search for information about brands ( Schivinski and Dabrowski, 2016). Social media was until recently seen as the domain of younger, technologically savy consumers that were adapting faster to the new technological era, it is now more generally considered to have entered the main stream and therefore more widely spread in its demographic (Stephens and Galak, 2012). This shows the change in the communication between the consumer and companies. Schivinski, Christodoulides and Dabrowski state that Social networking sites, for example Facebook, Youtube and Twitter, are becoming ever more important in the lives of consumers. They also suggest that because of this there has been a change in their communication habits as consumers are now more intensively engaging with social media (Schivinski, Christodoulides and Darbrowski, 2016). The regular, if not daily, use of social media by consumers facilitates the contact between them and a multitude of brands and products. Here is where the platform in which consumers can be understood. The interactions such the ‘liking’, sharing, commenting, reading and so on, of brand content on social media gives the consumer an outlet to express their thoughts and opinions about the brand (Schivinski, Christodoulides and Darbrowski,

Traditionally, before the 1990s and the age of digital, marketing communications were relatively limited in comparison to today. Marketing communications were one sided, only existed on traditional media, and were controlled and administered by marketing and brand managers ( Schivinski and Dabrowski, 2016). Faced with the Web 2.0 era, marketers developed models in which to capitalize on the growing digital enviorment. The most effect model, when used correctly, would be that of the Paid, Owned and Earned Media model. This model was adopted by marketers to cateorigize online and offline media activity ( Stephen and Galak, 2012). Paid media refers to adverstising and is company generated. Owned media is the type of media that a company generate within the channels it controls, such as posts on company’s blogs or websites ( Stephen and Galak,