Sunday, July 28, 2013

Retailing and Social Media

The Philippines has been named the social media capital of the world in 2011 for the most sign up in the biggest social networking site Facebook. according to research from 24/7 Wall Street after topping the social penetration scale rate of 93.9% ahead of the world's #2 - Israel that posted 91%, #3-Turkey 90.9%, and world's #4 - Chile 90.2%.

In 2012, The Philippines ranked #10 as a 9.5M strong Twitter users, who exchange tweets, information, conversation and news feeds to fellow twitter users.

Not to mention the other social media platforms such as Instagram, Google+, Linkedin and other social networking sites.  Yet if we look at the social media presence of local and international brands in the Philippines, there is still a huge vacuum and most are absent from reaching out the dynamic changing market behavior. Many traditional retailers still haven't foreseen the future of doing business in the fast-growing netizen community.

Some may have place their names on a Facebook Page, but if you will carefully look at their corporate or brand pages, there's really not much value to it.  Sometimes, to some point, they are not even being updated of their latest trends, products, mostly indicating their sale events or after-event photos.

What the digital and social media consumers need is an interactive, up-to-date and the latest information about the company or brands, information that may prove useful in the social media community to have a better judgement to spend on the given brand or products.  The new way of doing shopping is a well-informed consumer, its no longer the same as a shopper walking into a department store or supermarkets and pick up anything through impulse behavior.  People these days in the age of digital commerce have become more sophisticated.



The number of online social media users has been growing leaps and bounds from the time Facebook first came to be recognize  for use by many Filipinos in 2009 and Twitter in 2008.  But the traditional retailers have never catched up with the growing dominance of people staying longer in these social media sites and are still lurking expenditures on traditional forms of advertising.

With the growing commercial value of these social networking platforms, that has taken the mobile use by storm either through their Iphones, smartphones and tablets beyond their desktop or laptap usage, there is the likelihood of the those traditional retailers who has not taken advantage of the power of social networking sites to be left behind and gradually become obsolete towards the new generation of digital natives, online netizens.

Why has this been happening? Perhaps because most traditional even international product brands are owned, franchised, by traditional thinking businessmen and entrepreneurs, who are just looking at one side of the retail sales, especially the local chinese businessmen who perhaps in their traditional way of making their sales, are not aware of the growing social interactions since they themselves wouldn't have tried signing up for a facebook or twitter account.  Sometimes its having the first hand use of these networking sites, and in their daily interaction, can they truly grasp the power of the purse of these so-called social networking consumers.
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