Summary

2.3.4. Target Market Behavior
“Social media has overtaken pornography as the #1 activity on the web,” says Erik Qualman
of Socialnomics. 7 There is no denying that social media had changed how businesses consider their
marketing mix and new businesses leveraging on this new marketing channel. Consumers have also
changed their reading habit drastically due to the emergence of social media.
For the consumers on social media platform, they respond better to advertisements that drive
conversations and not unidirectional message. 8 Many companies make the mistake of constantly
writing about their product and services without engaging in a conversation with their supporters.
Top brands and companies know this and constantly engage their fans with interesting posts and
even surveys. For example, The Simpsons, which is the 7th most popular Facebook page at January
2013 9 , asked their fans to submit their trivial questions for the Simpsons game. The post boosted
over 6,200 “shares” and over 56,000 “likes” out of a total of 63 million fans as of 8 th Apr, 2013.
Another phenomenon that Eric Qualman noted was that the “shelf life of conversations has
been dramatically shortened” due to the great abundance of blogs and other social media like
Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare. Back in 2000, a blog post could solicit comments for about a full
week, but now, it had been reduced to three to four days. Older posts are seldom dug out and
commented because they are already archived “old” news.
Consumers are also less willing to log in to other platforms and prefer everything to be
within the reach of their preferred social network such as Facebook. For example many artists on
Wretch.cc, the blogging platform where the artist first started out, complained about the decreasing
traffic that they had been receiving over the past few years, so they had shifted focus to Facebook.
Even readers of Evacomics commented that they prefer to receive updates within Facebook so they
do not have to leave the social media site and can keep track of their comments and replies.
Consumers are also getting used to reading on the go, which means that they can carry their
7 Qualman, Erik. Socialnomics: how social media transforms the way we live and do business.
Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2013. 207.
8 Ibid., 137.
9 Darwell, Brittany. "Top 25 Facebook Pages January 2013." Inside Facebook. WebMediaBrands
Inc., 1 Jan. 2013. Web. 7 Apr. 2013.
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