How the Growth of Social Media has Impacted the Strategies of Marketers Today

How have marketers begun to change their tactics in order to appeal to these social media audiences? 
According to a recent article from “The Business Insider”, nearly two-thirds of marketers plan to increase their social media ad spending this year, including 31 percent who plan to increase their social media budget by more than 10 percent. For most of those advertisers, that growth is coming at the expense of other marketing channels. For instance, 23 percent say that they are shifting marketing dollars away from online display ads to social. Another 39 percent say they are moving some of their offline marketing budget to social media advertising and 10 percent are taking money away from other online channels

Have these Social Media influenced marketing campaigns proved to be successful? 

As evidenced from sales statistics, it can be said that for many companies, this type of marketing transformation has proved to be incredibly beneficial. One notable company that has benefited from a social media-based marketing campaign is Old Spice, as their body wash sales increased over 107% in one month after incorporating a “hilarious” social media campaign that was spread across Youtube. Additionally, after beginning this campaign, Old Spice’s Facebook interaction increased over 800%, and at one point they gained over 80,000 Twitter followers in 2 days. According to Mashable, another company which saw notable success due to a boost in social media marketing was American Airlines. In celebration of the 30th anniversary of its AAdvantage loyalty program, American Airlines ran a Twitter contest called "Tweet to Win 30K Miles." The Twitter contest was a smaller portion of a larger campaign, called "Deal 30," which involved 30 partner deals and promotions over 30 weekdays. Due to this campaign, within one week, @AAdvantage Twitter account experienced a 70% increase in followers, and the Deal 30 microsite garnered more than 27,000 entries. Thus, by obtaining a considerable amount of attention through these social media campaigns, these companies were able to achieve their goal of reaching a vast audience, and they even influenced Twitter and Facebook users to “follow them”, so that they can continually send these users updates and further marketing messages.

Questions to ask: 

What specific techniques or approaches have you seen companies use recently as a way to appeal to more users on social media websites?

How do you see the usage of social media marketing changing in upcoming years? Do you think that eventually this could become the main source of marketing for most companies?