Social Media and Oral Communications

Social Media and Oral Communications

Introduction

Social media itself isn’t word of mouth — it’s one way that word of mouth spreads. #wordofmouth. This hashtag shows how powerful social media has become in conveying any message. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter cannot replace word of mouth, but they have characteristics that word of mouth has. This essay discusses how social media is a hybrid marketing element that combines traditional and digital marketing.

Characteristics of Social Media

Social media has many forms of communication. There is the use of pictures, written message and short videos. Such means of communication share the same similarities with the traditional way of word of mouths. For instance, speech and the assurance that your message has been received. In addition to the conventional speech communication’s, social can spread the voice and video messages to many people and at the convenience of the receiver. This is one quality that makes social media better than word of mouth. A video message shared on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter will live there for as long as the sender wants and the intended receiver will get the news at his convenience. Besides, the fact that the message will live for as long as the sender wants shows that the message can be saved for future listening/watching.

One characteristic of word of mouth in marketing is referrals.  Oral communication builds deep relationships which in turn builds trust.  A recommendation by a friend or family about how good a product gives one utmost trust on the product. Social media cannot and probably will never build such relationships and trust, but with more comments about a product from your friends and social circle can give you some trust in the product. Also, more people offering their unbiased view, both good and bad gives one a basis to make a sound decision. This is more like word of mouth, only that the comments come from different people and with different viewpoints. Also, a combination of the two makes one of the best marketing strategies, with word of mouth giving people the trust they need on a psychological level and social media spreading such trust to different people.

Social Media Control and Influence

It is easier to control social media posting, but it is not easy to manage the consequences. As the saying goes, ‘You can choose your actions, but you can’t choose the consequences.’ Social media has the advantage of giving marketing manager free research and analysis of what the people or potential consumers of their products want to hear, through their posting and comments on previous products posted online or comments on competitors’ products. This gives the marketing department a good measure of what the people want and how they will react. Thus they can market their products based on such data. Also posting on social media can be easily controlled by the use of different features, such as LaterBro or Hootsuite that can schedule any posts a person intends to make. It is also possible to keep track of daily and monthly social activities by use of calendars from google or Yahoo. Social media helps in correlating data from different sources, and to measure your results. Finally, it is easy to organize social media outlets using dashboards. Such is the power that social media has in controlling content.

One of the biggest weakness of social media is that for inferior products or defects in products make the product have negative comments that can never be deleted, and this damages the image of the company making the product. This shows that for social media marketing, the products need to have passed the quality test.

Summary

With various tools that social media have, they complement word of mouth and spreading information becomes more manageable, quicker and cheaper. Social media have most of the characteristics of word of mouth, and when used together, they make powerful marketing tools. The scheduling and analytical data received from social media platforms give the marketing managers a lot of control on their content and how and when to use different marketing strategies.