The Impact of Social Media on E-commerce

The term WWW is not just restricted to 3 alphabets. It is a term that is large enough to shrink the actual and digital world together. I’ll even say it’s the horizon in between the digital sky and actual world. It’s the matter of time that firms that work in the early 19^th century didn’t even needed any online market, however, in today’s era it seems impossible for a firm to survive without a digital existence.

How ironic that now a firm without a place on the internet could not survive irrespective of working with an actual market place, thus, it can survive with an internet market but no actual place.

I must say that things do have quite change!

The reason we find things difficult is when they indulge in change, we fear change but if we embrace that the change is for our own betterment and it will help us out in the long run than it could definitely work matters out.

A recent survey claims that companies now generate $2.4 million in every 60 seconds with the help of e-commerce. Moreover, the astonishing fact is that a very large sum of this amount is dedicated by social media. Thanks Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter for working so hard on making business so easy by generating $40,000 in every 60 seconds.  I must say by the time our moms are done frying an egg a firm earns a huge sum of money. Every time someone says you are wasting time over the internet, so just tell them that you contributed a firm a bucket full of dollars in a minute.

The main question that stands here is that How Social Media Influences Consumer Shopping?

Why would a firm even prefer social media than a newspaper or TV ad or a magazine? It’s the communication. When a firm publishes an advertisement through any media despite social media they have to wait for a response for months and that is even indirect – response through sales – whereas, social media allows ‘two-way communication’ helping the firm to not only get quick response but also the reason of failure and success spontaneously. The advertisement has even got easier with respect to geographic and demographic locations. I would say firms create niche market but now they have even created a niche advertisement, separate advertisement for individuals. Every advertisement has the same message but broadcasted in a different manner according to the area or region. Social media does not require much cost so it’s quite easy to spread the word without many charges. Anything that is verbal isn’t quite as impactful as in written form, your interest that are listed on your social media accounts helps spread an indirect awareness to your list of friends.

You might have even been a target of indirect Brand War in your life on social media, now the firms do not pay for it to you but you do pay your loyalty to that brand. If you like Coca Cola and your best friend like Pepsi, both of you can be sharing the posts of your favorite brand irrespective of the fact that the brands are not just being an influence on you but they will be on your others friends’ newsfeed targeting them from the irresponsive market in to enlarging the market segment. 

I would like to end the subject that nothing is free in this world. Everything works with a solo concept of cost and benefit analysis that means the cost incurred is worth the benefit or not. Assuming that social media does not really require cost in monetary terms is just a bizarre thought but it does require you to pay the most valuable measuring tool that is time. You need to spend a lot of time working online and better be in the loop of what is happening with the existing activities of the brand and the upcoming activities that are being planned.

An Empirical Study Of The Drivers Of Consumers’ Acceptance Of Mobile Advertising

Drivers of mobile advertising are the key to great success in this medium. There are five drivers; stated as, utility, context, control, sacrifice and trust. Utility and Context have a positive impact on the consumer, whereas Sacrifice is considered as negative role playing element, thus, the other two; control and trust are not of much importance.

Mobile telecommunication is escalating so fast that the ownership of cell phones have exceeded 100% in multiple nations that include; Italy, Sweden and United Kingdom, these consumers either have more than one cell phones or SIM. Indeed US have a bigger market of cell phone and internet broadband industry but still it is slower to adopt these technological implementations than Europe. Our research country Finland had moved over a 103% by 2005. Person to person on a monthly basis it is estimated that one Finn send 37 SMS (a study in 2004). The universality – easily available – of these telecommunication services has lead marketers to promote, sell, and receive feedback spontaneously.

Mobile advertising is not just restricted to SMS service, but it also includes MMS, gaming applications, social software, digital photography, music and filming applications. These advertisement mostly pop-ups inevitably while in use. The drawback of SMS is that they are only limited to 160 character per message, so the marketer needs to keep his advertisement precise and on point so that most of the content is published within a message. SMS and MMS tend to create a better PR than other advertisement techniques.

According to Forrester Research, in European countries such as UK and Finland a greater than 50% of the marketers use the SMS advertisement and other mobile advertisements to promote on their sales. According to the Cambridge University research and study program, the numbers of SMS advertisements pushed forward in 2001 were to 9 % of the European consumers, in 2002 were 40 %, in 2003 were 54 %, in 2004 were 33 %, and in 2005 were 45 %. The despondent result is consequences of European consumers were not indulged much in doing online business, only 2 % of them were interested in business activity.

Research on consumer mobile advertising acceptance was conducted using a sample of 2,038 respondents from Nysveen, Pedersen, and Thorbjørnsen, who apprehend on the satisfaction and benefits turn a positive impact on the consumer views on mobile services. Another survey of 1,208 participants lay emphasis on entertainment and information drivers as the strongest of all drivers in appealing mobile advertisements. Another survey states that context driver; commitment, conditional value and monetary value are the greatest of all because they tend to attract more behavioral activity than any else of other tools.

The objective of this research is to specify on what and how the mobile advertisements should appear, they can be persuasive and informational but they have to be precise and unambiguous. Several study states that advertising are dependent on purchase variation and market research. In a nutshell research resources complies that the mobile marketers are mostly those that are world most leading brands, such as Coca Cola and McDonalds. These firms are affirming that this marketing channel is more productive and less costly with the most spontaneous output.  

Attitudes toward mobile search ad: a study among Mexican millennial

Mexicans born after 1980s is the era that is truly involved in the smartphone technology is facing a highly unfair and perceiving advertisement value that they come across whilst searching for local products and services from their smartphones. In the survey 1,215 millennial were smartphones owners. A sample of 315 participants evaluated on how they feel viewing the advertisement. The responses include as the ads were found informative, persuasive, entertaining or irritating.

The young Mexicans before purchasing a product tends to be in a loop with the price, the proliferating growth in consumer search has helped local merchants to catch their customer through the geographical locations within a proximate area. Search engines play a vital role in advertising; the “keyword-targeted” advertising is displayed by search engines on the behalf of those companies who are willing to pay these search generators. Furthermore, these search engines are willing to generate revenue on every pay per-click. These pop-ups are usually viewed in a more prominent way than the other results and are fixed to some particular positions on the SERP such as top, left and right. On a screen smaller than usual than there are only two sponsored results on the top and three organic on the bottom. The US Federal Trade Commission has warned these search engines to be fair and justifying by making it clearly prominent to the users and the users can differentiate between the paid / sponsored results and organic / unpaid results.

Users mostly perceive that the search engines are being paid for sponsored results by many firms to show their results on first priority, hence, the users are not really interested in them so they prefer the organic results the most. Whereas, the search engines believe in unbiased and totally fair business that has nothing to do with “under the desk” payments.

Several experiments were conducted that compared the ratio of both organic and sponsored results clicked by the users. The first was Jansen et al. (2007) that took a sample of 56 college students and 82 per cent of the time the organic results occur more than sponsored result, however, 73 per cent were interested in both. They stated the reason that the ones who preferred the sponsored one were willing to pay for purchase them were willing. Owens et al. (2011) an eye tracking study of 25 college students was held and the end result concluded that the top sponsored ads were more likely to be gain response than the side ones.

The objective of the surveys and research is that to emphasis on adolescents that are highly involved in tech and the use of smartphones is growing rapidly. A recent study states that 69% of the US citizens are involved in the usage of smartphones during shopping. It is suggested to the domestic businesses to bring themselves on this platform and avail the opportunity of being a result on SERP as this is the future and it can’t be overlooked because today’s generation is dependent on these  e-commerce searches.

Consumers’ intentions to opt in to SMS advertising: A cross-national study of young Americans and Koreans

Satisfaction and views can vary from country to country; American and Korean have different views on mobile phones. The issue and threatening fact of mobile advertising is that they tend to assume the location and interest of the consumer based on their search results and online purchases. Consumers are afraid that their privacy is at risk and they are not capable of keeping up a low profile. The purpose of this research project is to display that there are new advertising means introduced.

The proliferating growth of mobile phone has allowed the marketers to utilize this opportunity that they could promote their product based on the consumers’ demographic-location variations. These promotional activities are considered most useful when they meet the time and place criteria that are they are tend to reach the consumer in the most appropriate time span. Text messaging and pictorial messages are the new trend of communications around the world that has been used by these marketers also. Furthermore, a surveys states that these mobile generated revenues has reached up to a sale record of US$39 billion by 2007. Unbiased researches have stated that these cell to cell promotions have been escalating quickly and are found more interactive and responsive than the other means if communication. The messaging encoding and decoding has now been updated, additionally it has become swift.

Statistically speaking, 37 billion wireless advertisements are pushed to consumer’s smartphones and 65% of the population admire these and were efficiently responsive. Whereas 60% of the US population possess cell phones but they do not appreciate such pop-ups on their devices. Moreover, 80% of the US population is not even indulged in sending messages. Asian is satisfied with these advertisement strategies. On the other hand 70% Koreans uses cell phones but only a small proportion is lies into text messaging. SMS advertisement differs from not only person to person but also to personality to personality. The marketers work to the 11^th hour in hope of making an attractive and eye catching advertisement that consumers are ready to accept.

It is expected that the $45 million mobile advertisements in 2005 will grow up to $1.26 billion by 2009. SMS advertisement can be value added by discount offers and favorable information to consumers can increase the acceptance of these advertisements.

The objective of this study is to make prominent that social working bodies (society) and consumers attitude plus perceive plays a vital role in every sort of advertisement means, but mobile advertisement is more specific to consumers so they need more attention. Researches are still being conducted to bring more data on the record that shows how the consumers react to mobile advertising.

World's cheapest smartphone is here!

The cheapest of what one can expect from a smartphone is $4. Yeah! That’s quiet strange but just a few days ago in India, world’s cheapest phone came in discovery until now by the name Freedom 251, manufactured by Ringing Bells. The name Freedom 251 has a story behind, the price as per Indian Rupees is 251 and such an inexpensive device affordable for even the lowest categorized person there that allows ‘freedom’ for everyone to purchase.

Let’s give a quick review on its feature, Freedom 251 has a 4 inch display, 1.3 GHz quad-core processor, 1GB Ram and 8GB Rom, other than this it has 1450 mAh battery and 3.2 megapixel back and 0.3 megapixel front camera along with this it also provide us with a 32 Gb SD-Card slot.

 

Besides its price it comes with android latest version of Lollipop 5.1, and a few basic apps pre-installed such as Facebook, YouTube, Google Play and WhatsApp.

 

Microsoft To Acquire Swift-Key

Microsoft after the great loss on Lumia is prepared for a new investment to earn a huge sum of profit. It has decided to acquire London’s Al-Driven Swift-Key for $250 million. The firms have already been talking over this and have brought about the acquiring decision into the staff’s knowledge. Swift-Key raised a total of $21.59 million investment from Octopus and Index Venture, other than that UK celebrity Stephen Fry has also aided a bit.

At the moment Swift-Key is running on more than 300 million android and IOS devices. Thanks to its increasing technology, which is highly time saving and can help Microsoft more than just a keyboard.

Bad News for Lumia users!!

Windows phone are in deep trouble, Microsoft CEO Mr. Satya Nadella thought of making a good business out Lumia series after spending $7.2 billion in acquiring Nokia but in the end he gave up on the Windows Phone. Mr. Nadella had already redundant 7800 workers and is up for making some more. Microsoft consider itself doing what it is good at rather than wasting away time and money. It rather has decided to make a new series of flagship phones that are even going to surpass the generation of windows phones in the future.

Windows Phone The End.

Microsoft may deny the fact but the truth is that Microsoft has lost out on mobile devices. This is very much prominent with the weak sales, no more hiring and heavy investment in the growth of Lumia and fewer apps than App Store and Play Store due to no support from software developers. The only reason for the sale of Lumia phone is that either they are cheap or users need a substitute cell phone.