The Rise of Social Media Marketing

The role and importance of social marketing are at an all-time high. Actually, let us be more clear... social media is and will remain an undeniable force that dominates the marketing world for the foreseeable future.  Social is both an art and a science, and to ignore it would be foolish... well unless you're comfortable with being mediocre. Even businesses with that mindset are on a short time horizon to accepting the reality of needing a social media marketing strategy. The more likely scenario - it'll be too late for most who "wait and see". Waiting for some magical unicorn to dispel their fears of something they're unfamiliar with.

In this blog post, "The Rise of Social Media", I don't go into a timeline of events that have lead us to where we are today. Instead, I focus on comparing, at a high-level, the rise of social and decline in traditional Marketing communication activities - like, public relations.

In fact, if "social media" were a company and we had invested in "it" back in 2008, we'd be billionaires. Or, perhaps zillionaires. Data from Google shows the interest and search volume of social media marketing is at its highest levels. Imagine the below chart is a stock ticker...  

Yet many businesses and their marketing teams still rely on traditional marketing methods, like PR. Take a look at the chart below. Similarly to the rise of social media marketing chart, the below chart shows the significant decline and interest in public relations, as an example: