Social media marketing – making a difference?

Social Media has been in the limelight in the recent past. There has been a whopping increase in the number of users on social media and more and more people joining day after day. With the spread of internet facilities across the world, more and more people got the facility to get into the World Wide Web. In 1995 there were about 16 million internet users worldwide which was merely 0.4% of the total population in the world. In the year 2012 internet were accessible to 2405 millions of people which is 34.3% of the total world population. There has been an increase of over 566% growth in the number of users between 2000 and 2012 as per the internet world statistics.

The growth in the number of internet users and the growth of social media and its users have made it really attractive for the marketers to look at it as a better marketing tool there by making present in the various social media sites to market their product. Many a times the marketer goes live in the online space, but they do not follow up or keep themselves updated in the online space through the social media which brings negative results to them. Social media is a live medium which is updated every second. Are these participations worth? Or is social media marketing a myth or a reality? Is it going to help the marketers? This paper examines the effectiveness, opportunities, the threats and other aspects of social media marketing.