Effect Of Social Media Sites In Consumer Behaviour Marketing Essay

Published Date: 23 Mar 2015

The new age internet sites provided online properties to allow people to communicate with each other, unlike dead internet sites, and hence create meaningful relationships over a period of time. It may be on the ground of hobby or business, it can be anything. In the online world a company can brand itself easily and without gigantic marketing budget, through videos, discussion groups/massage boards, blogs. Social marketing is used successfully and strategically by numerous marketers to increase the appeal of their business. It is easier to find out business minded people interested in similar niche in the online world. To spruce up their network of friends with common interests successful entrepreneurs also use social networking sites, they share ideas, exchange information and in the long run establish relationships and take it to the next level then promote by becoming partners or referring someone interested in the venture.

The attributes for the Social Media sites in Influencing Consumer Behaviour of innovation in models and development; and market efficiency. In a development, the amount of information available is already vast and increasing daily. The goal of our paper is to investigate the paramaters effecting Social Media sites in Influencing Consumer Behaviour. The effect of social media sites was measured by applying Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP). It uses the forecasting attributes in the proposed Consumer Behaviour model to ascertain the relative importance of the processes towards a successful Social networking sites implementation.

This paper discusses the comparisons for the successful advertisements on websites or social networking sites. It also considers Social Responsiveness, Information Search, Time Spent, Peer Group Influence and Satisfaction as a parameter to see the influence of Consumer. It calculates the priority by using the Analytical Hierarchal Process

Keywords: successful advertisements, Analytical Hierarchal Process, Consumer Behaviour

Introduction

A social networking service is an online service which is defined as an explaining the interest of practice of expanding the number of one's business and/or social contacts by making connections through individuals. Social networking has encouraged new ways to communicate and share information This explains the idea of concept that any two people on the planet could make contact through a chain of no more than five intermediaries.. Social networking websites are being used regularly by millions of people. While it could be said that email and websites have most of the essential elements of social network services. Social networking is based on 6 degree concept which explains social networking establishes interconnected Internet communities (sometimes known as personal networks) that helps people to make contacts that would be good for them to know. In general, here's how it works: you join one of the sites and invite people you know to join as well; those people invite their contacts to join, who in turn invite their contacts to join, and the process repeats for each person. In theory, any individual can make contact through anyone they have a connection to any of people with a person and so on.

Along with other form of advertising and promotion, the social networking sites also have been always the leading ideas to promote business. The purpose of the Online marketers is seriously to gain output through social networking slowly and steadily not through a business which creates through its own brand but also can create a lot of additional traffic, which would have been difficult or impossible to attain. In the initial stages the business may be slow, but latterly can build a solid foundation for a brand to fix properly through social online marketing, considered as great free advertising tool. By responding to the queries and questions with analytical insights raised by members in the niche massage boards or forums, a company appoints spokesperson can let know other members of the group about its brand and thus enable the mouth publicity to spread further. Networking is just like the next buzzword these days, but it was actually the oldest form of communication in this ancient world. The popularity of networking websites is spreading all over the Internet. These sites can be used as marketing tools in addition to the obvious use to make new friends. They can help increase website traffic by sending tons of traffic to your website and for an added bonus; they can also improve your search engine ranking.There are certainly some dos and don'ts that one must abide by to avoid criticality as Social Networking sites do not have strict rules for joiners. To understand the do's and don'ts that are required to follow in social networking in for promotion, a set of steps need to be folllowed in order to capture your target segment.

A social network service focuses on building online communities of people who share interests and/or activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others. Most social network services are web based and provide a variety of ways for users to interact, such as e-mail and instant messaging services. Social networking has encouraged new ways to communicate and share information. Social networking websites are being used regularly by millions of people. While it could be said that email and websites have most of the essential elements of social network services, the idea of proprietary encapsulated services has gained popular uptake recently.The main types of social networking services are those which contain category divisions (such as former school-year or classmates), means to connect with friends (usually with self-description pages) and a recommendation system linked to trust. There have been some attempts to standardize these services to avoid the need to duplicate entries of friends and interests, but this has led to some concerns about privacy.Though there are several social networks that are flourishing on the internet today, but the flourishing 3 websites in today's world are - Face book, Linked in, twitter for the following important reasons reach , prominence, uniqueness,. purpose, customizability, and data personal experience.

Face-book has come as a clear leader among all the social networking sites. According to the 'State of the Mobile Web' report conducted by Opera Software, Facebook is also the second most popular site visited by Opera Mini users from India. Indians have shown a major transformation in usage patterns, Traditionally Indians are known to spend their time on search and email related activities on the mobile web but with the boom in the handheld-devices market. Today, availability of content and ease of access have catapulted a range of content-rich portals to rise up in the most visited domains list. According to the report, Twitter is the second largest social network site in the world with 300+ million active user's worldwide. Its motive is to follow your interests, its' service type is micro blogging. Its revenue is about $140million as per 2010.Its based on the principle of followers for a celebrity and total number of tweets. 57% of all Indian Twitter users have joined the platform in less than a year! With such quick rise in popularity and with masses coming into fold, brands and advertisers are have to quickly adapt to the ever changing dynamics of this medium.LinkedIn stands for its professional status in social networking. It's the best of its kind. Globally it has 135+ million active users. Revenue is around $121millions. LinkedIn is very oriented toward your professional network, it looks like the most professional looking of all the social networking services, and not your broader personal network. LinkedIn allows members to look for jobs, seeking out experts in a particular area, or to make contact with other professionals through a chain of trusted connections.LinkedIn Advertisements is a self-service advertising solution that allows you to create and place text advertisements on prominent pages on LinkedIn.

Recently form the past some years, marketing has brought increased growth in the social networking phenomenon. Face book or Twitter have became a key part of a number of people in their daily routine. Now-a-days various Organizations consider these social media sites as a publicity vehicle of rich potential. Indeed, various companies have already enjoyed exceptionally large sales boosts as a direct consequence of endorsement from social media sites, blogs or other online communication channels. One of the most common tendencies of people making purchase decisions is by an advice from their friends. Indeed, word-of-mouth (WOM) recommendation from friends and significantly have long been recognized as a powerful weapon in any marketer's armory. On that consequence, it is sensible to assume that the suggestions which emerge from friends in social media sites might have influence, which is similar to a conventional WOM recommendation.

In today's world there are many Social Networking Sites in existence on the World Wide Web (WWW).  The most popular ones for business use are LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are the famous of social networking sites. These sites allow users to create profiles and add people as friend, bring people with similar interests together and also allow them to create connections to construct a social network. "A social network consists of all the people friends, family and others with whom one shares a social relationship.Advertising on Social Networking Sites can be low cost. Business and organizations are focusing on the cost reduction in the current global economic scenario. Hence, this type of advertising is a highly useful strategy in this economic situation.  To compare with the conventional advertising, the Social Network Advertising seems to require time to establish the effective profile and posts, and more time to actually implement these techniques on a regular basis, but it have low costs for the business. Social sites are not just for the company to broadcast information for consumers, but for consumers to participate in open free conversations with these companies by posting, commenting and following their Facebook pages, Twitter accounts or blogs. Facebook and Twitter provide quick updates information and company changes functions to users and however for more engaging conversation blogs are generally used to provide more information to their audience and allow for comments and questions. Jet star Company is one of an example of using social networks to promote their company.

Social Network advertising is taking advantages of reduced cost, increased sales and the customer interaction. It is important that businesses build online platform to prevent the negative effect and guarantee and maintain their Social Network as it may be damage the reputation and worth of the brand.  Social media is a great advantage to companies as it allows them to interact with people at the level that they are on, even it is through Twitter, Face book, YouTube or blogs. This involvement with their customers helps businesses to increase sales, allows the customer to be part of the brand or simply as a customer service tool. Thus, the importance of maintaining a social media plan is to ensure customers are kept in active. There would have certain disadvantages of using the Social Network, like, people share negative comments with business, though not represented to affect companies. In another way to say, it is advantage for companies to provide opportunities to improve their weakness and attract customer's participation. Complaint or negative feedbacks can also arise from unsatisfied customers and quickly spread across the social sites. While social networks open the company up to negative feedback and comments, it is much better for them to be in the space so they have a chance to reply back and be heard. One of the sure concern of the Companies, and allows companies to participate with their customers and listen to their positions in the Social Network. In case of the companies without the social media sites, those customers would complain that they were not getting responses from the company, therefore company needs to set up this communication and get the root of a problem is the most crucial benefit company using social media (Burson-Marsteller, 2010).

As more people are spending more time online as well as social networking sites, it indicates there are advantages for businesses to be participating in this Social Network. According to the data graph, 79% of businesses are already using some form of social networking for their business allowing them to essentially promote their brand or product to increase sales. As with the Blendtec example, a low cost effective YouTube campaign increased their sales five times (Mashable, 2009). "My Starbucks Idea" the Starbucks an example, which showed that companies advantage from introducing the customer into their business and building their engagement to make them feel like they are part of the businesses and providing opinions for improvement. This engagement works two ways with the consumer feeling loyalty to the brand as they are part of the company itself.When the business encourages to create Social Networking marketing or advertising, they need to organize and consider all aspects of Social Networking, if they have sufficient prepare of the plan or organization, it is possible to control any circumstances when it comes, in case of the negative feedbacks or complaint, companies can make improvements or respond immediately and become a part of customer service to solve and help customers in the fastest way. Overall, probably the strongest advantage of social networking in business is because of the consumer. Allowing a customer to have the opportunity to receive customer service or have realized their concerns in short time to meet their needs for instant satisfaction.

Traditional advertising have became of lower importance as via social media we have gained greater access to what our friends think. People more emphasize on their experiences and their friends' experience with brands and products than on advertisements. Thus, the concern should be on, to understand the basic behavior of people when it comes to decision making. In Advertising on the Brain it states, people "have an emotional and a physical reaction, before engaging in rational thought." In other words, the process goes like, feel then react and then think. Most advertising fails to understand actions which are succeeded by positive emotions. If some kind of negative emotion are felt which may be intentional or not, then the consumer turns negative towards the brand/product.Marketers have to be intelligent towards the emotional reactions that they create, general in creating positive emotional reactions, and make it easy for people to try their brand/product, thus solidifying the positive emotion that makes them share about their experience with others hence there is rise of engagement advertising. In Charting a Shift from Communications to Engagements it says, "The new marketing is about creating 360⁰ brand experiences, not messaging. Consumers should buy into to your brand's ideas, not just your product. Instead of defining 'Reasons To Believe', there is a need to define 'Reasons To Be.' "Brands no longer are "contained in any communication or campaign, but rather is understood through its many touch-points." positive touch-points should b created, and positive ROI should also b created. Thus, creating multiple positive touch-points requires a creative mind, here Marketers have to be stay strong and willing to risk failure, and ideally allow a minimum of three months to test any marketing/advertising ideas to see what works. The more we can incorporate social technology into real-life events, the more people get excited and curious about it." Marketers should be restless to incorporate promotion of art into their work. After all, art creates positive emotion, which begets action.

Consumer Buying Behaviour

Many decisions are being made by the consumers daily. 'What consumers buy where they buy, how and how much they buy, when they buy, and why they buy' are the main concern of big companies to research on, they need to know about consumers buying decisions. Actual consumer purchases can be studied by the Marketers to find out what they buy, where, and how much. The answers are often locked deep within the consumer's head hence learning about the why's of consumer buying behavior is a bit difficult.The main focus of the marketers is on the question that: How do consumers respond to various marketing efforts the company might use? The company that really understands how consumers will respond to different product features, prices, and advertising appeals has a great advantage over its competitors. The starting point is the stimulus-response model of buyer behavior.Marketers have to understand a lot before marketing strategies can be developed. People using consumer markets buy goods and services for personal consumption. The varied consumers differ tremendously with age, income, education, tastes, and other factors. The buyer's characteristics and by the buyer's decision process influences the consumer behavior. Buyer characteristics include four major factors: cultural, social, personal, and psychological. Similarly, we can say that following factors can influence the Buying decision of the buyer are a. Cultural, Social, Personal,. Psychological

Consumers making buying decisions mainly affect buyer. The buyer decision process consists of five stages: need recognition, information search, evaluation of alternatives, purchase decision, and post purchase behavior. Clearly, the buying process starts long before and after the actual purchase.The entire buying process should be focused by the marketers rather than just the purchase decision which implies that consumers pass through all five stages with every purchase. Yet, in more routine purchases, consumers often skip or reverse some of these stages. A woman buying her regular brand of toothpaste would recognize the need and go right to the purchase decision, skipping information search and evaluation. Thus, we use the model in Figure because it shows all the considerations that arise when a consumer faces a new and complex purchase situation.The buyer recognizes a problem or need which is the starting of the buying process, known as need recognition. The buyer recognizes a difference between his or her actual item and some desired item. The need can be triggered by internal stimuli when one of the person's normal needs- hunger, thirst- raises to a level high enough to develop its craving. A need can also be triggered by external stimuli. At this stage, the   marketer need to thoroughly research consumers to find out what kinds of needs or problems arise, what brought them about, and how they can manage with the consumer related to the particular product. By gathering such information, the marketer identifies the factors that most often trigger interest in the product and can develop marketing programs that involve these factors.

The emerging new influencer community is wielding significant power over the perceptions of brands and companies, the influencers to communicate are largely driven by the rapid expansion of social media channels through. The new "some-bodies" which were the "nobodies" of the past are demanding the attention of communication professionals' continuous seeking engagement with targeted consumers throughout the various channels of the social web. A new level of activism is witnessed by Corporate management from an influential constituency rarely heard from in the past - ordinary consumers. A large share of voice benefits in the market are gained by many of these new consumer influencers. It is due to the impact of the internet, and the technologies that bring together people who share common interests, Consumers are impacting brand equity as never before. This unnerves corporate marketing practitioners with high responsibility for brand management.

To control the brand conversation, Companies feel the pressure. They may not currently have a voice in the social media space. However, establishing a presence on Twitter or Facebook without the due diligence required to make the effort worthwhile will produce few worthwhile results. Simply due to acquiring a presence on these sites for the sake of maintaining control over the brand discussion for providing the illusion of taking action which sometimes feels like taking control. Four out of five internet users visit a social network site on a monthly basis, with Facebook and Twitter causing much growth in the industry, and six out of seven US internet users now viewing online video content in a month (Radwanick, 2010).

LITERATURE REVIEW

Social media in marketing is a communication tool that makes the companies access to people who are interested in their product and makes it aware to people who are not aware of it. It is used as a mechanism to create a personality in a brand and earn relations with people around which helps them achieve customer loyalty with increased repeat purchases . social media is so different that it is used for the interest and the needs of the business. 2010 Social Media Marketing Industry Report 2010 says, 56% marketers use social media for 6 hours and sometimes more. The most sought after tools in social media for marketing purpose is twitter, LinkedIn, face book and blogs. While 81% plan to increase usage of blogs , 76% of whole marketers are preferring to spend at least 4 hours for advertising efforts on social media. Presently it has become extremely essential to build good consumer base, and to increase there contribution in decision making. According to Soft pedia, in US 86% of online retailers had a face book page which can increase up to 99%. 65% of these retailers are pretty active on twitter and 26% of them are planning to use twitter for plans. Social media gives marketers a voice and a way to communicate with peers, customers and potential consumers. It personalizes the "brand" and helps you to spread the message in a relaxed and conversational way. As far as face book is concerned 700 thousand retailers already have a face book page and around 80 thousand web portals are currently properly connected via face book.Social media provides a platform to marketers to pass on there message and idea to customers and potential customers. It customizes the brand and gives them an edge in connecting with masses. Beverage companies, automobile companies, pastry shops use social media . Pepsi ,Coke, Nokia efficiently use social media for completing there targets. involved companies in social media are Absolut Vodka - have a top bartender fan page on face book,BMW - a Rampenfest Page for fans for promotion of 1-Series Road Trip.,Dunkin Donuts - a micro blogging Twitter account and using it valuably,General Motors - utilize online equity to reach to there consumers.

Recently, marketing through social media has become an outreach activity to easily connect with customers by developing awareness of brands .though there is a shift in the trends as now its affecting sales so there is a mindset to develop a channel that is committed in engaging with the masses. As analyzed by Wet paint and Altimeter - engagementdb.com, we have concluded that most of the successful companies are maintaining 7 or more accounts on social media tools or channels.Internet gives businesses with lots of methods for communicating brand to customers. The most common form is banner advertisements used for promoting opportunities on internet. Banner activities are just like print media with an added facility of clicking on banner and directly reaching to advertisement. It can do two things basically for the marketer. A visitor surfing through publishers website will look at banner ad . therefore a banner ad will help them get a customer. Actual success of banner ad is when the visitor buys the product. Failure of clicking, advertisers think that a visitor will see the banner ad and remember it in their heads. This means the visitor pays attention to the content of a banner ad and decides to visit the site in the future, or it means that the visitor will glance on the ad but is clear and have knowledge of the product or service offered.

This second effect of advertising is known as branding. Product Class congruity between a banner advertisement and website should have a there is a direct effect on consumer's mind towards the website based on banner advertisement and the website considering the product class congruity. customers attitude towards brand is very essential in understanding there purchase decisions. attitude toward brand is a feeling which can be evaluate consumer's hold to a specific brand .going by the traditional view made up of personal beliefs of the attitudinal objects, brand attitude gets effected by advertisements. In addition to this there is attitude towards the website. Corporate Web sites offer a variety of services such as direct selling, projecting corporate image, providing product information, generating qualified leads, dispensing electronic coupons, and handling a variety of post purchase tasks (Berthon et al., 1996; Hoffman and Novak, 1996). A lot of online traffic is generated by companies through active promotion of the address uniform resource locator (URL) with an online registration with search engines, hyper textual links with other Web sites and in major cases paid banner advertisements on other Web sites. This method is of huge concern now a days. Like a TV, radio or print advertisement tells the audience to call an 800 number or direct mail has the receiver mail in a reply, a banner takes the visitor to the advertiser's page. when not clicked, advertisement banners definitely impacts the attitude of the visitor and help build the brands product and services offered by marketer (Elliott, 1996). banner advertisements increase the popularity. Web advertisers are dicey regarding the cost per thousand (CPM) pricing model based on impressions, that insist on payment for results or click throughs.

Advertisers need to know that who is clicking and what are the reasons behind it.. Answering to this will help businesses to incorporate websites system into there marketing plans and result in better decisions based on advertising response modeling. A banner ad can be successful in many ways. methods to judge and evaluate banner ads are as follow a) Clicks/Click-throughs: It is basically the number of clicks made on that banner and judged on the basis of cost per clicks .b) Page views:, this is the number of times page has been viewed from the server Also called page impressions. It gives an idea that how many people could have seen the banner ad. though it does not give proper view of the visitors and branding campaign. The most popular way to sell banner ad space is cost per thousand impressions. c) Click-through rate (CTR): It is a ratio of page views to clicks and generally expressed as a percentage of people who viewed the page and actually click through to banner ad.. The typical click-through-rate is 1 percent.d) Cost per sale: This helps evaluate the amount of expenses made on getting one sale. Different means are used for this purpose. Internet cookies are used which allows to combine the actual sale made and how customer reached the site.

Improving banner click-through rates are essential for the marketer and the Web site doing the advertising. As banners are priced according to click-through rates, everyone works to improve click-through rates. click-through rates will advertiser understand which Web site offers the required options. Click-through rates are affected by various factors generally ranging from 2% onwards. animation , cryptic messages , posing questions are methods to improve and understand response rates, it also includes call to action phrases, color and animation, with a sense of urgency tending to decrease response rates (Double Click and I/PRO, 1996).another way to improve response rates is targeting advertisement banners based on website requirements. banner 's response rate declines due to excessive exposure, with research indicating that banner (DoubleClick and I/PRO, 1996; Modahl and MacQuiddy, 1996).According to Ofcom research most of the children have a profile on a social networking site on internet. The report shows that how important have social networking sites become for Briton people. 49% of internet users are in the age group of 8-17 year olds, the report also tell us that over a 22% of internet users aged 16+ have a social networking profile. According to research it is common for adults to have a profile on more than one site and more than half of social net workers say that they visit their accounts once in a day . It has been indicated by research that social media sites have changed meaning of friends. People now derive its meaning making list of people have only online friendship but never met in real life.( 2 April 2008, Social Networking: A Quantitative and Qualitative Research Report into Attitudes , Behaviors' and Use Ofcom Social Networking Sites Research)

Dennis A. Pitta says, use of advertising media in a traditional way have been reduced in the last few years due to online competitors. The mixture of these connections, increasing Wi-Fi and access to internet, and apart from this varies preferences of customer and ease in getting what they want has put traditional media in danger. Companies that did not exist ten years ago, like Facebook and Twitter, now overshadow traditional publishers face book and twitter who had no standing earlier now overpower the traditional media. Newspapers, for example, being most popular are now hardly existing. cities that boasting of having huge variety are now hardly having one . Even Washington Post  was so successful is now surviving by offering lesser ads and also reduced content result the jobs in newspapers are getting affected and size of the content is getting reduced. Taking example of the classic magazine, Business week, It was sold to Bloomberg for less than $5 million (Journal of Consumer Marketing, Volume 27, Issue 5 Dennis A. Pitta).

Social media has also affected radio and television advertising as well. Though , they are not dying out completely but are giving importance to alternatives. the trend toward product in traditional ways of advertising have reached its highest point. A US television show, Bones, featured actors driving in a Toyota Sienna minivan. One commented that the car seemed unsuited to the driver who was a single woman. Her reply was that as she was artist, the Sienna had enough space for her canvases and was still a good car to drive. In this way by twisting traditional ways traditional media is still trying to keep up there standing. For super active marketers social media acts as a breath of change. They give a two-way one-to-one marketing message. Though the manner in which described is complicated but is accurate. Social media has a strong word of mouth which can be easily given to there audience, which is the one-to-one element. Furthermore , it gives advertisers freedom to understand the consumers reaction.

There is a surprising trend towards social media due to the advantages available. Therefore advertisers have shifted there budgets to social media due to wide reach as it reaches there target market more easily. Advent of a new marketing tool leads to using it to best possible level. The challenge is to understand the advantages and disadvantages of social media. Agencies are employing experts in this area and are trying to master the information resource to lots of advertisers. This has led to development of specialist companies that give new and varied approaches to advertising on social media. These companies have a better idea search engine optimization and blogging. The changes made in social media started about ten years ago with rudimentary tools like the personalized greeting cards supplied by Blue Mountain Arts. Consumers send greeting card via online social media sites on special occasion for example Christmas. Popularity increased because of a multimedia templates that gave a touch of personalization with a professional look. Over time, competitors gave systems that support bigger and smaller social communications. The focus lies on creative communication that people can use to publish their personal details like pictures, status, tweets and other messages. Also , social media creates a new model that helps customers to share the personal information with their friends.

Socialmedia.com is one organization that masters this new ways. Socialmedia.com is one of the largest independent social media company engaging in advertising. It has experience in delivering ads to "over 40 million people each month, within 5,000+ applications running … " on Facebook, Myspace,etc. The there motto is to make advertising more relevant. There is a large amount of consumer involvement in social media, Socialmedia.com gives a variety of products that increase the advertising message. Its products use See-Share-Syndicate model. For example Socialmedia.com,provides a web site display of an advertisement for Windows 7. The overlay of this kind basically give three features of the software. First, visitors only see what they think is important. Second, visitors like to share there experience with friends. Thirdly Social media helps count each vote and can communicate the message to a viewer's social networking site. Socialmedia.com uses similar structure for other products as well: social interaction ad, friend-to-friend ads, Twitter ad, video ads and community polls. The basic requirement is viewer being happy with the ad and also shares it with friends through online portals. The biggest advantage of Social media's is the improvement in communication: reach to the larger group consumers in the online community. it takes original content from people and changes it into sponsored one. The best way is to choose the best message that conveys to prospective consumers. Socialmedia.com uses two techniques: social influence ranking and self-learning optimization to choose the user message. The company states that it is different and provides a variety of solutions to customers.

They should avoid the homepage-takeover distraction created of traditional online marketing. It is pretty similar to our product placement gone haywire example linked to Bones. The internet provider changes nature of our emails to provide extra security and new facilities, we are subject to this information when we open our e-mail inbox.. We have always try to block it like as tv viewers have found methods to avoid advertisements. The major difference is that social media focus on original content real people no such ads that could be avoided. The challenge is to understand ways to share and produce advertisement in a way that its reach is wide and covers the target audience completely and maintain the brand equity. Social media has a huge product offering not only this but a benefit of providing solution to a large target market. Companies like Socialmedia.com helps them get a positive word of mouth which has huge importance as it enhances the value of products and services.

Andrew Keenan says ,social media sites are major way of social interaction.. From Facebook to Myspace to Twitter, these websites are increasing and growing in users and visits by those users. How do these websites increase social interaction ? What unique aspects make users to socialize on these sites with other ? it is to explore sociability on the social web and understand how these sites help visitors interact. Websites those were examined are Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn and Twitter. After enrolling themselves on the websites , proper observations were made by judging experience. These experiences were used to understand the different approaches .Many approaches are used by social websites. Facebook is about privacy and showcasing real networks, while Myspace is about publicity and showing both real and virtual world in a web environment. Whereas websites like LinkedIn and Twitter focus on solving problem to make purchasing decision or certain areas with specific reasoning (Holbrook and Hirchman 1980).The blogs help companies interact with to consumers. The blog is an answer to increased online browsing by consumers, by inviting customer by giving the information they want and to which they will respond as customers will only feel interested if they find any value in it. Consumer engagement could be seen through calculating amount of comments and posts whatever is use full will only attract consumers. Changes in the way the information is posted and its emotional connect will help. Also feedback from consumers about the firm that result in emotional connect and act as a major impact on customer using corporate blog. It also acts as a way to brand recall, develop brand relationships and make consumer able to see the value in company and products offered. The result is the brand loyalty that helps retain customer and as well as build new ones as well.( 24 March 2009, Andrew Keenan ,School of Library and Information studies and Humanities Computing Program, University of Alberta, Edmonton ,Canada, and Ali Shiri (School of Library and Information Studies , University of Alberta, Edmonton,Canada)

According to Mary Lou Costa, "it only pays to advertise if you advertise in the right place". Costa reports that more companies are using social media and also targeting communities who are active online. However, this has not been very popular yet. The dialogue from ''The Social Network,'' the film about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, said: ''You don't get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies.'' These social media sites do attract vast audience but it does not mean they meet every brands strategy.Brands like Starbucks and Nike, have created their own communities. The O2-owned Giff gaff has a community model that Robbie Hearn, a senior executive, describes as a ''crowd-sourcing customer service.'' Customer queries are cleared by the brands on these communities. Though Hearn tells us about side effects of being ''seduced by the term social media.'' Using Facebook and Twitter can also be harmful because if it gives vast customers so does comes suggestions and complaints which if company fails to cater it can result in unhappy customers. Brand ownership is now being shared by consumers and the brands themselves. Through social networks, blogs and videos, consumers are aware of everything around them. Gone when media would communicate the message of brand. Now customers are themselves the storytellers and brand ambassadors due to their activity on social networking sites.

Such customers must be kept happy and increased from time to time. its essential to recognize such storytellers and properly structure them and integrate them into social media strategy. Companies must monitor what is being talked about them on all these social media channels. No matter if the conversation developed are positive or negative ,a proper work by company can judge such a person who can turn a unhappy customer into a happy one. In the world of social media, such brand ambassadors are changing the way to interact with their target audiences. fundamentals of public relations are similar to those of social media, the difference is the added feature of this new social media marketing channel allows customers who are brand loyal known as practitioners to engage with influencers one on one. Practitioners act strategically and listen and understand as well almost immediately to continue consumer interactions about and with the brands. bloggers have increased to a manifold in past years and so has their power as influencers for social media and consumers, understanding and judging the most affecting will be an essential part of any social media campaign. (Norman Booth, Julie Ann Matic 2011)

There are two benefits of social media that are important to businesses, they include a)Cost reduction by decreasing staff time. b) Increase of probability of revenue generation.Social media enables companies to: a) Share their expertise and knowledge .b)Tap into the wisdom of their consumers.c)Enables customers helping customers. d) Engages prospects through customer evangelism.Thus the benefits of social media include: brand reach and awareness, consumer interactions through transactions, referrals and reputation management.Social media is best understood as a group of new kinds of online media, which share most or all of the following characteristics a) Participation-Social media encourages contributions and feedback from everyone who is interested. It blurs the line between media and audience.b) Openness-Most social media services are open to feedback and participation. They encourage voting, comments and the sharing of information. There are rarely any barriers to accessing and making use of content - password-protected content is frowned on.c) Conversation-Whereas traditional media is about "broadcast" (content transmitted or distributed to an audience) social media is better seen as a two-way conversation. d) Community-Social media allows communities to form quickly and communicate effectively. Communities share common interests, such as a love of photography, a political issue or a favorite TV show.e)Connectedness-Most kinds of social media thrive on their connectedness, making use of links to other sites, resources and people.

This type of marketing consists of efforts made by social media in order to make the products and services offered look worthwhile. it is marketing using social networking sites and blog. Lazer and Kelly's (1973) define social marketing as "concerned with the application of marketing knowledge, concepts, and techniques to enhance social as well as economic ends. It is also concerned with the analysis of the social consequences of marketing policies, decisions and activities." Social media marketing is not about having a presence on first page of social networking community but actually a strategic and efficient process that help develops a good impression of company , brand and product or service offered. A study, "The State of Small Business Report," done by Network Solutions, LLC and the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business, say that the economic competition has led to growth of social media. The study results show that 12% to 24% increase was seen in usage by small companies, and almost 1 out of 5, use social media actively as part of their marketing strategy. Earlier only 23% were using social media which has grown to 31%.

Since a decade, social networking is on the rise for strategic reasons and also for personal use. With its popularity increasing time to time, the need for business to go social is inevitable. four main reasons for social networks used as advertising tools are as follows:

1. Cost efficiency- It is relatively cheap for advertising on social networking as compared to other Traditional media, it gives a wider reach at a much lower cost involved. Also , it is possible for companies to have free publicity through different Advertising techniques. There has been a number of successful marketing Campaigns through YouTube and Facebook . Creating a page for a brand in facebook is free and along with it gives huge followers.

2. Large reach- Social media sites have become extremely popular and have a wide reach due to regular users . The impact for a social network reach of an advertisement on a large scale. With its demand for advertisement is increasing, showing an advertisement is important in such networks is essential for its improvement in areas. The reach by a social network is more than any other mass media .

3. Targeted advertising- Advertisers have access to a lot of information about Users and their interests, allowing them to personalize and target the advertisements to a large amount of customer base not yet seen in any other advertising medium. For example, if a user says " Wrestling" as an interest on their Facebook profile, the websites system will make advertisements based on that particular interest. However, there are Privacy issues: Facebook's Beacon targeted advertising system suffered a great deal of backlash and had to be modified heavily to appease its users.

4.Time spent online- on social networking sites people are spending large amount of time online, at the sacrifice of traditional advertising media such as television and newspapers. This can be seen as a result of many of the traditional functions - news, television shows - of the old Media being shifted online to social networks such as Digg and YouTube. Advertisers are increasingly looking for methods to reach out to consumers who are Spending more and more time online.

The role of marketing communications is in the objectives related with of Web presence and e-business. Information systems development Strategies to get such objectives are informed by one of the models of the communication process that can be adjudged as having three different stages:

(1) The cognitive stage - potential customers become aware of products.

(2) The affective stage - customers form opinions and attitudes concerning products.

(3) The behavior stage - customers take action (such as making a purchase) on the basis of their experiences in the first two stages.

The best known of these models is the AIDA Model, which has four stages:

(1) Attention

(2) Interest,

(3) Desire

(4) Action.

Various researchers (Berthan et al., 1996; Day, 1997; Ducoffe, 1996; Loebbecke et al., 1998) have searched the effectiveness of social media in contributing towards the fulfillment of objectives. Leong et al. (1998) business managers' views on the areas in which Web makes an impact. Berthan et al. (1996) propose other objectives for Web sites:

Creating brand, product and corporate awareness and image;

Providing product and other information;

Generating qualified leads;

Handling customer complaints, queries and suggestions;

Allowing customers access to the extranet.

Otherwise , Web presence is less effective for changing attitudes and static environment. Whether the less success with maintaining attitudes is in the medium, or is associated with the stage of e-commerce that was prevalent when many of these studies were undertaken is not clear. The later stage of e-commerce offer the opportunity for a double sided relationship might have more potential for affecting on attitudes (Ghose and Dou, 1998). This communicative model of e-commerce is reflected in the five-step model for Web advertising and marketing suggested by Kiani (1998), which tells us the following five stages: consumer awareness, attraction, Web site visit and contact, purchase and re-purchase. Attraction is achieved through brand awareness, convenience induces return visits which further elevates the repeat purchases.

The effective theories in marketing is behaviour towards the advertisements. The attitude that is formed towards the ad can affect consumers behaviour towards the brand as well as their purchase intention.

The ultimate goal of advertising is to develop a positive view and increase value to product.

A positive response to an ad gives best judgment about its social connect. It shows that when consumers likes an advertisement of a brand, they are more likely to be tempted for the brand and buy it.

Brand recall is another component of advertising impact. Such a top of mind awareness helps the recalled brand to have a competitive ad. Although the internet users always click on a particular link to see what the advertisement all about. Like internet shopping is considered to be a huge issue as traditional thoughts are forcing people away from it.

The area of concern is that people don't find online marketing persuasive.

Apart from this, internet users sometime think of it as distracting and disturbing it thinks it as a waste of time and do not divert from their activity that they are already doing.

Therefore, all these factors affect the success of the internet marketing. Though companies are now finding creative methods to get online users. Several promotional schemes, discount offers are given for this purpose. Social media today is looking for innovativeness to attract consumers by understanding their mindset and relativity with brand. Thus marketers need to pay attention on this in future

Research Design and Methodology

The AHP is a decision approach followed in the solution of complex multiple criteria problems in a number of application domains. In view of the complexity and uncertainty of decision situations, which almost all retrieval problems are prone to it, it becomes very important that the problems are micro-managed and that a hierarchy of means-ends is created so that the critical factors impacting performance are duly taken care of. It is here that AHP can be an important aid in decision-making. The important advantages of AHP are its simplicity, robustness and the ability to incorporate both 'tangibles' and 'intangibles' into the decision-making process. The AHP proposed in this research is to handle factors and sub-factors of effectiveness of sponsored advertisements on facebook. The decision maker judges the importance of each criterion in pair-wise comparisons. The outcome of AHP is the weight of each decision alternative. Three steps are followed for considering decision problems by AHP namely constructing hierarchies, comparative judgment, and synthesis of weights.

Structural Hierarchy

This step allows a complex decision to be structured into a hierarchy descending from an overall objective to various 'criteria', 'sub-criteria', and so on, until the lowest level. The objective or the overall goal of the decision is represented at the top level of the hierarchy. The criteria and sub-criteria contributing to the decision are represented at the intermediate levels. Finally, the decision alternatives or selection choices are laid down at the last level of the hierarchy. A hierarchy can be constructed by creative thinking, recollection, and using people's perspectives. There is no set of procedures for generating the levels to be included in the hierarchy . The structure of the hierarchy depends upon the nature or type of managerial decisions. Also, the

number of the levels in a hierarchy depends on the complexity of the problem being analyzed and the degree of detail of the problem that an analyst requires to solve. As such, the hierarchy representation of a system may vary from one person to another.

Comparative Judgments

Once the hierarchy has been structured, the next step is to determine the priorities of elements at each level ('element' here means every member of the hierarchy). A set of comparison matrices of all elements in a level of the hierarchy with respect to an element of the immediately higher level are constructed so as to prioritize and convert individual comparative judgments into ratio scale measurements. The preferences are quantified using a nine-point scale. The pair-wise comparisons are given in terms of how much more element 'A' is important than element 'B'. The synthesis of Priorities and the Measurement of Consistency is the pair-wise comparisons

generate a matrix of relative rankings for each level of the hierarchy. The number of matrices at each level depends on the number of elements at the immediate upper level that it links to. The order of the matrix depends on the number of elements at each level. After developing all matrices and obtaining all pair-wise comparisons, eigenvectors or the relative weights (the degree of the relative importance amongst the elements), global weights, and the maximum eigen value ( λmax ) for each matrix are calculated. The ( λmax ) value is an important validating parameter in AHP. It is used as a reference index to screen information by calculating the consistency ratio

(CR) of the estimated vector in order to validate whether the pair-wise comparison matrix provides a completely consistent evaluation. The consistency ratio is calculated as per the following steps:

(a) Calculate the eigenvector or the relative weights and ( λmax )for

each matrix of order n.

(b) Compute the consistency index (CI) for each matrix of order n as:

CI = ( λmax - n ) / (n - 1)

(c) The consistency ratio is then calculated using the formulae

CR = CI / RI

where RI is a known random consistency index obtained from a large number of simulation runs and varies depending upon the order of matrix.

The acceptable CR value for a matrix at each level is 0.1. If CI is sufficiently small, decision maker's comparisons are probably consistent enough to give useful estimates of the weights for the objective functions. If CI/RI ≤ 0.10 , the degree of consistency is satisfactory, but if CI/RI > 0.10 , serious inconsistencies may exist, the AHP may not yield meaningful results and the evaluation process should therefore be reviewed, and improved.

Table 3.1 Random index values

Order of Matrix

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

RI

0

0.58

0.9

1.12

1.24

1.32

1.41

1.45

1.51

AHP allows decision making processes to be structured by firstly arranging conceptually related

components under a higher concept dimension. The structuring decomposes a problem into finer details in a hierarchical fashion that finally can be depicted through a tree-like diagram. It begins with defining an objective, followed by global criteria to sub-level or local criteria. The number of levels depends on whether the decomposition exercise can provide further meaningful differentiation on the criteria among decision makers. If further breakdown does not provide

differences in meaning, the structure at hand is considered sufficient.

Once the structure has been finalized, the decision making process starts with comparing two

criteria at a time. A set of n elements in the entire hierarchical structure would yield n(n-1)/2

comparisons. The scale used in the decision making process ranges from 1 to 9 (see Table 1), and allows decision makers to express their preference in linguistic terms verbally.

Table 3.2: The AHP Scale

INTENSITY OF IMPORTANCE

DEFINITION

DESCRIPTION

1

Equal Importance

Elements Ci and Cj are equally important

3

Weak Importance of Ci over Cj

Experience and Judgement slightly favor Ci over Cj

5

Essential or Strong Importance

Experience and Judgement strongly favor Ci over Cj

7

Demonstrated Importance

Ci is very strongly favored over Cj

9

Absolute Importance

The evidence favoring Ci over Cj is of the highest possible order of affirmation

2,4,6,8

Intermediate

When compromise is needed, values between two adjacent judgements are used

Reciprocals of the above judgements

If Ci has one of the above judgements assigned to it when compared with Cj, then Cj has the reciprocal value when compared with Ci

A reasonable assumption

In the present study for the pair-wise comparison, we have relied on actual data, that is, the data extracted from the survey. The question for pair-wise comparison of quantitative criteria is considered as:

"Of two elements i and j , how many times i is preferred to j " If the values for the criteria i and j are, respectively, wi and wj , the preference of the criteria i to j is equal to wi / wj

.

Therefore, the pair-wise comparison matrix is:

Thus effectiveness of advertisements can be measured through Analytical Hierarchical Process:

The data collected through questionnaire will be analyzed through AHP technique to arrive at the final priorities.

3.2 Proposed AHP Model for Effectiveness of Advertisement

SNS has become one of the latest tools for marketers to reach their target audience. Every company is trying to be present in SNS actively. Every company is creating pages on SNS, to promote about their recent activities, share information, latest developments in their company, new product launch etc. Facebook offers services like targeting of a certain group of audience through age, sex, place, interests, birthdays, and several other personal information provided by the users to facebook. Companies are following various approaches in facebook to target their customers.

Model for Advertisement

Effectiveness of Advertisement

Website

Social Networking Website

Peer Group Influence

Time Spent

Information Search

Social Responsiveness

Satisfaction

To study whether the social network advertising effective in sales for companies or is it simply ending up in attracting junk traffic

To study whether a customer like being approached on social networking sites

To what extent can information- and recommendation-seeking within social networks be supported on the web

To study how people choose information and recommendation sources from among members of their social network

To study which factors influence judgments about the relevance and trustworthiness of these information and recommendation sources

The sampling technique would be Convenient Sampling as there is no particular set of targeted respondents so respondents would be chosen randomly depending on the availability and interest in participating in this study.

The sample set consists of the respondents in the age group of 18 to 30 years and above. These are the active SNS users. Most of the respondents are students while others are in some kind of Job. All the respondents are at least graduates and are consumers of branded products and services offered by different companies that have presence on SNS.Sample size used in our study is 164.

The comparison matrices showing the measure of each attribute's relative importance with respect to the overall objective . For the pair wise comparison of the attributes and sub attributes, there has been reliance on inputs obtained from the survey.Five attributes have been considered as important for effectiveness of advertisements in Social Networking Sites. The main factors of advertisements considered over this study are are compared in terms of social responsiveness , Information search, Time spent, Peer group influence and Satisfaction.

4.1 Pair wise comparison w.r.t Effectiveness of Advertisement

Effectiveness of advertisement

Social Responsiveness

Information Search

Time Spent

Peer Group Influence

Satisfaction

Sum

Priority

Social Responsiveness

0.095238

0.17

0.029851

0.071429

0.283019

0.653449

0.13069

Information Search

0.047619

0.09

0.298507

0.071429

0.056604

0.561115

0.112223

Time Spent

0.47619

0.04

0.149254

0.428571

0.09434

1.191834

0.238367

Peer Group Influence

0.285714

0.26

0.074627

0.214286

0.283019

1.118515

0.223703

Satisfaction

0.095238

0.43

0.447761

0.214286

0.283019

1.475086

0.295017

Sum

 

 

 

 

 

5

 

From the above table, it is evident that in effectiveness of advertisement , Satisfaction has an importance of 29%, Peer group influence and Time Spent has an importance of 22% and 23% respectively. Social Responsiveness and information search has an importance of 13% and 11% respectively.

Hence, it is evident that Satisfaction is the most important factor which consumers look for and Peer group influence is the main reason that users look for when going for certain products/ services. The more the time they will spend on internet the more the satisfaction they will get.

4.2 Pair wise comparison w.r.t Website

Website

Social Responsiveness

Information Search

Time Spent

Peer Group Influence

Satisfaction

Sum

Priority

Social Responsiveness

0.058824

0.06

0.09434

0.035714

0.038043

0.283101

0.05662

Information Search

0.411765

0.39

0.283019

0.535714

0.570652

2.194408

0.438882

Time Spent

0.176471

0.39

0.283019

0.214286

0.163043

1.230077

0.246015

Peer Group Influence

0.176471

0.08

0.141509

0.107143

0.11413

0.617905

0.123581

Satisfaction

0.176471

0.08

0.198113

0.107143

0.11413

0.674509

0.134902

Sum

 

 

 

 

 

5

 

The pair wise comparison of websites w.r.t five factors i.e social responsiveness , Information search, Time spent, Peer group influence and Satisfaction done in above table shows that information search has the maximum weight age of 43% then comes the time spent with the weight age of 24% while peer group influence and satisfaction have weight age of 12% and 13% respectively and social responsiveness have the least weight age of 5%. So this table shows that proper information is available on websites but weight age of other factors are very less.

4.3 Pair wise comparison w.r.t Social Networking sites

Social Networking Sites

Social Responsiveness

Information Search

Time Spent

Peer Group Influence

Satisfaction

Sum

Priority

Social Responsiveness

0.179449

0.18

0.142228

0.208048

0.191784

0.901456

0.180291

Information Search

0.211117

0.21

0.1769

0.29505

0.191784

1.086554

0.217311

Time Spent

0.267835

0.25

0.21228

0.126576

0.232865

1.0936

0.21872

Peer Group Influence

0.13997

0.12

0.272154

0.162277

0.16808

0.858919

0.171784

Satisfaction

0.201628

0.24

0.196438

0.208048

0.215487

1.059471

0.211894

Sum

 

 

 

 

 

5

 

When pair wise comparison of social networking sites is done w.r.t different criteria's all of them are almost having the same weightages with very less differences. Time spent and information search has the maximum weightage of 21% each. This shows the ever rapidly increasing use of the internet and its varied uses in India. The peer group influence, Social responsiveness and Satisfaction in social networking sites have the weightage of 17% , 18% and 21% respectively which means that peer group suggestions is considered by majority of the consumers while purchasing a product. Social responsiveness also plays a very important role a