The Social Media Revolution

'We don't have a choice on whether we do social media, the question is how well we do it' - Erik Qualman author of Socialnomics

The increase of usage of social media in the past few years has caused a massive affect on the way things are advertised for example in 2010 Coca-Cola cut its spending on advertising by 6.6% but increased its spending on social media. (full article). A massive 77% of UK consumers use information from blogs to influence their purchases compared to only 14%using adverts. We're in the middle of a social media revolution and I feel things are only going to escalate. (Interesting video)

Use of social media
The National Wedding Show
On The National Wedding Show website there is no information about following on them on Facebook and when you 'Like' their page the only information you seem to get is about celebrity weddings and a running commentary about what's going on at the event, they don't seem to be interested in advertising the event, In my opinion they should have used Facebook to try and sell more tickets to the event rather than report on celebrity weddings.

This is vastly different to Ben Howard's Facebook page where every post is 'him' promoting his album or trying to persuade people to buy tickets. He also announces which festivals he will be playing over the summer and reporting on the atmosphere of the gigs he's just played. I think status updates like these are quite helpful as it advertises to people in a more informal way as the statuses are not constantly bombarding your news feed.

Twitter
Twitter marketing jumped from 3% of companies in 2008 to 49% in 2009, that being the most recent statistic I could find but it has most definitely increased since then. In 2010 25 Billion tweets were sent so it seems right that advertising must move to twitter as well. Although the only downside to twitter advertising is 43% of people unfollow companies because of too many push marketing strategies.

Ben Howard's twitter reflects his Facebook as all the tweets are about his upcoming shows but also tracking his progress on tour.

The National Wedding Show 

The National Wedding Show also reflects their Facebook as the tweets are mainly about celebrity weddings and links to wedding blogs. The National Wedding Show has 5072 followers whereas Ben Howard has 53337. This probably reflects the audience as a more younger audience will be on twitter whereas the older audience of The National Wedding Show might not be using twitter.

xoxo