Sayak Pal, Author at Adamas University

#PositiveCorona: The positive effect of COVID-19 on social media advertising

When Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook from the Harvard University campus back in 2004, the platform was merely used for inter-campus communication among the students, and their ware very few who guessed about the magnanimity of the platform to this scale. Similar to Facebook, other social media platforms started taking their first step from early 2000 as the internet became cheaper and widely available, and the cost of owning a smartphone also gone done and came within the reach of the common people, the usage of social media also rose to a significant level. There were rejections of the medium at some level but eventually, the popularity of social media beat all the odds and tightened its clutches among the different layers of the society. What made the social media even more useful is when the marketers started seeing a pool of opportunities to reach out to their target market easily through the social media and began using this medium as a centre of communication and promotion for their brands. Gradually, over the decade, the medium became one of the most potent ways of commercial communication for the advertisers which allowed them to reach out to their potential group of consumers with multiple hit points. The interactive nature of the medium allowed its users to be glued to this medium for a longer period, given the advantages to the advertisers to push their message in between the entrainment. The e-commerce sites have gone to a step ahead and link their sites and apps to the social media sites while flashing the recent search items, provoking and reminding consumers to take the final purchase decision. While most of the advertising platforms require monetary investment to slip the message into the platter, social media allows to advertise free of cost but obviously, the investment will take the message to a much wider range of audiences while aiming to a desired and a targeted pool of audiences.

According to the “Diffusion of Innovation” theory developed by E. M Rogers in 1962, an idea, behavior, or product while launched in a society, passes through different layers of acceptance before getting widely accepted among the people. The adapters are ranged from the ‘Innovators’ to ‘early adopters’ to ‘early majority’ to ‘late majority’ to ‘laggards’. As the product reaches the laggards at the end of the acceptance channel, the advertiser tries to encourage its enlisted and loyal consumers to purchase another product from its line of offerings. The theory is well accepted and applicable for a social structure while social media gives an ultimate social stratification to apply the theory while launching a product through social media. There is always a small group of ‘innovators’ who wish to try out newly launched products and also influence ‘early adopters’ by sharing their experiences. For advertisers, social media platforms can be an appealing option to lure the innovators out of their lair to experience the band while capturing the attention of a larger pool of prospective consumers by sharing their pictures, videos, comments, and experiences on social media. Because of the flexibility and broader reach of the medium, the advertisers are prone to use social mediums as an extensive part of their promotional strategies where they can also keep a tab on the progress ambiguously. The omnipotent nature of social media enables the marketers to approach the consumers located across the world while the platform algorithm allows them to set the advertisements in different time frames focused on a diverse pool of consumers.

Usage of social media platforms comes to a pick during the global pandemic of COVID-19 when people around the world are stranded behind their doors and barred from physical interaction to stop spreading the deadly virus. The pandemic left no other ways of interactive interactions among the people leaving the social medium as the only way to keep the communication alive among the friends allowing them to share pictures, videos, adios, and even video calling facilities. This also showed the advertisers a way of survival when other modes of advertisements were not an option and allow them to promote their brands with minimal investments. This also provides the flexibility to approach a large group of audience who are primarily concentrating on social media with a relatively low investment. The pandemic also forced many bands to take the shelter of social media promotion who earlier used to believe in the traditional mode of promotions since the diversion and proliferation are lesser due to the global pandemic that barred people to go outside. The circumstances also worked in favor of social media where the production of the advertisements does not always need the involvement of the physical location while the placement of the advertisements is done virtually. The social media was among the few options that kept people connected during the severe situation and also helped the brand not to lose out the communication with their valuable consumers. Now, when the virus spreads are being controlled and life is getting back to its usual accord, social media still helping the society to get back on to its feet. Interestingly, both the government and private organizations have taken the help of this wonderful medium to propagate their message while some of them were meant human welfare and some were to achieve the commercial accomplishments while the medium remains stoic with unparalleled benefits.

Facebook for Business

Facebook has been one of the most potent mediums that bonded the people in one virtual place to share their thoughts, ideas, and all kinds of a possible form of information without being physically involved. This social media platform has been an enormous success after its launch in 2004, by Mark Zuckerberg focused to improve the internal communication among the Harvard University campus. Unlike other social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, who are generally focused on a particular category, Facebook certainly welcomes all its users to share all kinds of content (except few prohibitions) without any charges. The unique nature of Facebook is to host the conversation which is of common interest and the users can increase the multitude of information by sharing and re-sharing them on their walls, groups, and pages. One thing that is common in all the Facebook posts is that the platform looks out for the opportunities to engage more users through the content which is often used by the brands to propagate their schemes and offers and also increase brand awareness among the potential market. Several brands are using Facebook as a tool of promotion for their brands to reach out to the potential segment through innovative campaigns and there begins the need of formulating a proper and effective business plan for the medium.

There are multiple befits of using Facebook for business:

Facebook is a free social media platform to subscribe and use (though some services require investments).
One an account is activated and promotion starts, it gets the opportunity to be discovered by the other users who are searching for similar products or services.
Facebook provides a friendly environment that helps users to easily be in touch with each other and also maintain a healthy relationship among them.
Facebook provides the option of creating communities to facilitate the brands to share their information.
The platform often comes handy when generating leads for their business.
Facebook makes personalizes communication easier for the users to design and serve it to the targeted one.
Through Facebook, the process of feedback to answer the complaints and grievances becomes faster and more effective.
Facebook allows us to share multiple types of content in innovative forms to attract consumers.

Personal vs. professional usage

Most Facebook users use the platform for recreational purposes and share the content of their choice which also indicates their personal choice and inclinations. While the individual profiles are generally meant for personal usage, the pages and groups are quite extensively used by the brands to set up a channel of communication with their potential market. But to create a business page or group, a profile must be created, which under any circumstances should not be used for personal communications and all the commercial communication needs to be sourced out from the business page.

The following benefits can be utilized offered by a Facebook page:

A Facebook page allows multiple interactive activities like following, sharing, liking, inviting friends to drive the traffic towards the page to increase its reach.
Email address, website link, postal address with the locational map can be added to a page for better navigation. On a business page, the opening and closing hour details can also be added for physical store locations to help out the consumers.
A Facebook page can also host job postings to attract suitable candidates for their organization.
While managing all the activities of a page can be challenging for one person, Facebook allows to disseminate the responsibilities among people with multiple altitudes like “Admin”, “Editor”, “Moderator”, “Advertisers” and “Analyst”.
All the Facebook pages are by default accessible to all the uses, making it easily searchable.
A Facebook page allows us to put details of the product or services to make the search easier and narrower.
The privacy features in Facebook make the information shared on the platform secure while ensuring the free flow of information to the target sections.
The algorithm helps the users to easily mage and control their pages.

The usage of pages varies for different purposes and they can broadly be categorized into the following types.

Local business or place
Company, organization or institution
Brand or product
Artist, band or public figure
Entertainment
Cause or community

Another important tool that can be used for marketing brands and their products or services is Facebook groups. While sharing most of the characteristics with pages, most groups allow the members to share their content on the “group wall”, while the group admin has the authority to remove any person or any post that does not fit for the group at any point of time. A Facebook group can host multiple interactive activities to engage and retain the member to the group. One such activity is the polls that can be used by the brands to understand and gather information from the consumers without disturbing their regular activities. Polls generally include the options spread across with a question and allows people to choose from. The same can be used by the brands to identify the consumer’s preferences and expectations from the product or service and help them in modifying the same.

Facebook services are mostly free and allow the users to use them for their benefits but there are services requires monetary investments to multiply the effects like the Facebook ads which proved to be extremely helpful for marketer and advertisers to uphold their brand offerings among their consumers.

Website content creation: An art of writing

The revolution that takes the brand presentation to a higher and omnipotent level started with the invention of the World Wide Web. While a website facilitates marketers to present their products and services with detailed descriptions, it also allows the brand to show the values, ethics, and other products and services they are offering. A website is more like a bucked with multiple portals that lead to different information centers about the brand. Most e-commerce websites allow people to post their reviews and ratings to guide potential consumers to make purchase decisions. The entire existence of a commercial website is to provide information about the brand and the organization behind it while other kinds of non-commercial websites also serve as the information centers but on a different scale. Three basic building blocks that complete a website and they are the domain and server where the website will be hosted for views to search and access, the coding and designing section that provides the structure and look to the website and the content and creative section that serves the information to the seekers. While the first two sections require more technical expertise the last section demands the usage of creative abilities to produce the content for the website.

The content part which primarily deals with the information related to the products and services requires following some norms that govern the viewers’ attention on the website. Style of content for the website is different from the content written for books, magazines, newspapers, articles, blogs and similar as there are few strict rules needs to be followed while preparing content for the website because the web content is a mixture of textual and visual elements which helps to create a user experience for a website. Thought the style of content varies from commercial websites to personal websites, the content developer needs to remember certain points while developing content for websites.

Know about the target audience

The most important reason to launch a website is to showcase the brand and its benefits to its target consumers. That is why a few questions need to be answered like who will be the primary and secondary audience? What level of education you are expecting from them? is the audience sensitive about your product or service? and similar as the content of the website directly affects the decision-making process of the consumers.

Inverted pyramid format

The content of the website will also follow a similar pattern as we see in the newspapers. Considering the short attention span of the viewers, the most important and relevant information will be at the top while slowly and gradually explaining the minute details of the same. All types of websites should follow a similar pattern and design while working on their content.

Short and simple writing

When writing the content of a website, one should always remember that they are writing for the viewers who have a shorter attention period and average educational clearings. Therefore it is advised to use short sentences that are easily understandable and carry simpler words but at the same time interesting enough to attract the viewers. The difficulty of the language also differs on the nature of the website, for example, a research-based educational website will certainly have a higher level of language usage than an e-commerce site. It is also advisable to use active voice rather than passive one for a better understanding of the readers. The use of jargon should also be avoided as much as possible because that might create confusion while reading an important piece of information leading to consumer disagree and rejection of the website.

Easier to navigate

Most of the readers do not prefer to read all the content that is been laid out on the page as they skim through the entire text looking for the specific information required for them. That is why text-heavy paragraphs should be replaced by short and informative paragraphs and if possible tag them with subheads and bullet points to make the information easier to digest. Information should also be spread out in a manner to make them easily traceable, else they might drive the visitors away from the website.

Visually appealing

Including pictures, graphics, videos, animation, diagrams, maps, and similar will help in retaining the reader’s attention towards the page as text-heavy sites might seem boring for readers to skim through. Including visually attractive elements to a page would increase the traffic to a particular website and also helps in engaging the visitors for a longer period. Usage of pictures and videos is absolutely necessary while writing for a product based website while charts and diagrams are often come handy for research-based websites.

Linking pages

Restricting the access of the viewers on one page is not desirable which creates the requirement to embed hyperlinks inside the page content to direct the viewers to other important and relevant pages. For example, if the website demands the viewers to contact them through their website, then the contact us page should be hyperlinked within other pages to drive visitors towards the desirable page. Sometimes the call to action links is also embedded within the website content to make the users click on the links to reach the desired location.

The purpose of creating a website varies based on the nature of the business but it reflects the image of the brands through its products and services, while website content certainly helps in clarifying the claims of the brands to the users.

Social media for advertising

COVID-19 has severe effects almost on the entire human establishment leaving few minor areas with minimum damages. The damages are not only on physical health but this virus has also affected the cognitive health of humankind. People are forced to stay indoors and quarantined where it is in our nature to socialize and over the centuries it became one of our preliminary needs. Like we cannot think of leaving without fulfilling our ever defined basic needs of food, water, shelter, and clothing on an everyday basis, the restrictions were never meant to put down on our social activities. This virus hit on our social gathering and forced us to stay quarantined for months. Researchers have predicted this mental fatigue that we might encounter during this quarantine period and also recommended a host of remedies for them. Many of the remedies recommended investing this time in productive works like reading, writing, and honing personal skills. This will not only divert the attention towards the productive activities but also keep the attention rooted so that it does not get fractured or hopped around the corners where it might bring back negative emotions.

The situation is similar to the advertising industry. The global pandemic has forced many organizations to slash down their budget on marketing and promotion including a major cut on the advertising. The reason being the stagnant condition in the production and operation of many industries that forced to bring down the budget on multiple levels. In a recent scenario, where a decline has also been witnessed in online advertisements has affected the industry as well where the number of advertisements on social media has reduced to a great level. While the advertisement has always been a great strength of the promotional strategies, any organization that has an online presence is almost bound to promote their brands on the social media platforms, making social media advertisements an integral part of the promotional strategies. The increasing interest and involvement on social media unlocked the doors to reach out to a large number of people at the same time even belonging from different parts of the globe. Similarly, the Return on Investment (ROI) is also being calculated for social media to keep a track of the investment made on social media platforms. N. P. Jadhav, R. S. Kamble, and M. B. Patil proposed an equation to calculate the ROI for social media that would help to keep an eye on social media expenditure and investments.

Social media return- social media investment

Social media ROI= —————————————————————————————————————————————–

Social media investment %

Figure 1: equation proposed by N. P. Jadhav, R. S. Kamble and M. B. Patil to calculate ROI for social media

Investing in social media promotion might be a clever option especially during this global pandemic when most of the traditional mediums are going low with the advertisement expenditure. While the cost of promotion on social media platforms is relatively lower and flexible enough, it allows even the small and medium scale entrepreneurs can easily afford to publicize their products and services on social media. There are tracking mechanisms to trace out the reach of the advertisements on social media to evaluate the performances of the advertisement campaigns which is a difficult task for outdoor advertisements. Social media posts also allow imposing reactions in the form of ‘like’, ‘love’, ‘simile’, and similar to understand the reactions of the viewers while enable them to share and re-share the content on their timelines and groups and pages. The Comment facility works as a detailed analysis of the consumer’s reactions to the contents shared by the organizations and often helps the researchers to bring out the essentials from them. The recommendations coming from the comment section are not a rare sight that viciously helps the developers and marketers to improve on their production and promotional strategies. Like the beta testing of the websites which preliminary works for the developers to signify the consumer reaction and level of satisfaction towards the product or service, some organizations prefer to run the campaign for a shorter period to test out the consumer’s reaction on them to launch it for a longer period and a greater market diameter. This doesn’t not only provide a brief forecasting about the market and their probable reaction on the promotion but also end up saving cast and preventing damages to the product or service. These beta testing often produce the changes identified by the views or users that the developers failed to incorporate in the first place that helps out in making a near-perfect solution for the consumers.

Every social media is different from others and caters to the need of its users therefore the promotional strategy for different social media should be different depending on the requirement of the marketers. While deciding upon the promotional strategies, we should also look out for the basic functions of social media as some of them are primarily for sharing pictures, some are dominant in sharing video and some hosts all kinds of content into it. Marketers should design the campaign aligning with the basic nature of social media and measure the outcome based on similar parameters. The best part of the social media has probably been realized during this global pandemic when the physical gathering has been restricted, encouraged the marketers to go online with their offerings while using innovative ways to showcase their product or services, and what could be a better option than reaching out to the mass market through the social media!

Magic of Reading

A global pandemic is not a new thing for us and humanity has been facing these pandemics for ages. Sometimes the effects were centered around a specific place and sometimes it spreads like wildfires devastating civilizations, pushing some indigenous communities to the brink of extinction. One of the oldest recorded mass pandemics was found nearly five thousand years ago in a Chinese establishment that forced the remaining people to leave the dead bodies at the home and burned them down to the ashes. All this information and records are kept securely for ages through ancient scripts while scholars are doing their researches relentlessly for years to excavate the reason behind the phenomenon to find the possible cause of those pandemics. When we read those works of literature form the scholars across the world through their pictures descriptions, those incidents come alive to us. This is the beauty of well researched and beautiful writing. The use of appropriate language to tell and retell the stories is the real art and that can only be achieved if you have a vault full of vocabulary and the key to arrange them accordingly.

I always believed that reading can drastically improve the quality of writing and it worked for me. If we dig a little deeper and refer to the very basic model of communication, we can easily relate them both. For successful communication, we need a structured and glitches free flow of the information from the sender to receiver where before sender, comes the ‘Information source’ which is the origin of information that keeps supplying the valuable data to the sender. The key to a beautiful reading is the zest of reading and inculcating every possible information from them. It is somewhat like the computing system, where output can only be derived if only input is given. I believe the best possible way to get inputs or suggestions is through the reading, in any form or mode. Many people dislike reading storybooks but love reading spicy gossips or political updates and similar. Instead of tagging them in the “Not interested” category, we can simply categories them “Readers with specific interest”. Love of reading may vary depending on the forms or genre of literature but cannot be ignored completely. Any kind of literature is bound to provide linguistic superiority to the reader and more of it brings a better grip on the language and vocabulary to the writer.

There are numerous benefits of reading that can prove to be helpful for an individual in multiple ways.

Mental simulation

Our body needs regular exercise to stay healthy. Similarly, our bran also needs to stretch out to stay healthy and productive and reading provides the same to our brain. It is also suggested that variation in reading is even more helpful and often boosts our memory better than similar kinds of content.

Depletion of stress

There is a famous quote “a book lets you travel throughout the world without moving a step” which truly is one of the most amazing characteristics of reading. This is quite useful while managing the stress and anxiety that we face in everyday life. A good reading can take away the reader from the trouble he is facing and transport him into a realm of happiness and joy.

Memory Improvement

We often complain about the bad memory and try out memory boosting medicines to improve its capacity when an easier way lies just ahead of us. Whenever we read anything, we tend to create new memories. Especially for books, we need to remember the characters, plots, situations, and interlinked incidents till we finish off the book which helps in forging new synapses as well as strengthening the existing once while creating new memories. This process not only helps in recalling short term memories but also helps in stabilizing the existing one.

Boosts Analytical skills

Reading increases the analytical skill of a person especially if you are a fan of mystery novels. Most of the readers are aware of the multifaceted Satyajit Ray who was an author, illustrator, director, music composure, screenwriter, lyricist, and also a proud winner of the ‘Oscar’ award. One of his legendary creations is the character “Feluda” who is an avid reader and used to sharpen his analytical skills from the books he has been reading for years. The analytical skills that are acquired from the reading can certainly become useful in many occasions and applicable in real-life situations.

Improved focus and strengthening concentration

Lack of concentration is a general phenomenon for many while keeping our focus on one particular point for a longer period of time is a tricky task. As our attention is divided into a gamut of elements, it is often hard for out to stick to a particular one while an interesting piece of writing can certainly help us to retain our attention to it. Regular reading habits would gradually improve the focus of the person and strengthen the concentration of the person with time.

Better writing skills

No two fingerprints are ever similar in every detail. Similarly, every writer has his or her unique style of writing which reflects the inner creativity. Sometimes one write up can resemble the style of others but are never the same. Reading helps in expanding the vocabulary, strengthening the grip on grammar and language which in turn helps in producing better writings.

If we have to document all the benefits of reading, we may have to create a small book to accommodate them all. While occasional reading can be a wave of fresh air, regular reading can hold the freshness forever and nurture it into a forest full of knowledge, joy, and happiness.

Mechanical Emotion

It is surprising that how this virus outbreak focuses us to maintain social distance by isolating us within a very limited periphery, but it also brought out a lot of subliminal favors that we always had, hidden deep within ourselves. According to Charles Robert Darwin, The most intellectual or strongest species may not be able to survive a changing environment but the one who can adjust itself to the changing environment has the chance of survival. While humans are the most intelligent and somewhat stronger than most of the species, it adjusted the environment in its favor instead of changing and adapting itself according to the environment. Not only is the physical supremacy that is required for humanity to survive in the changing environment but an emotionally favorable atmosphere is also required for healthy sustainability. When most of the animals remain rooted within the basic need to satisfy their livelihood, humans created psychologically and self-fulfillment needs to satisfy its multiple levels of requirements.

Being a social animal, it is difficult for us to not to go out and socialize, though the social media platforms are allowing us to be connected virtually, the lack of physical social interaction is driving out many of us crazy and Imprudent. It is funny that despite our multi-level needs, we are always bound to our basic needs like other animals with lower intellect. The moment the supplies get restricted, the basic animal instincts get stronger to satisfy the psychological needs to sustain our mortal from. What makes us different from other low intellect creatures is that our craving for the kinds of stuff that are part of our need but not required for our survival. A recent example can be laid on to support this claim when the government decided to allow the liquor shops to be reopened almost after five weeks of absolute closedown and we can witness the rush of the people to get their favorite booze. This might prove the theory that despite the risk of contamination and death, humans are capable of overcoming their fear to chase out pleasure beyond their survival requirements.

Technology makes the emotions mechanical

Once the telephone came into existence, people preferred this medium more than sending letters to their dearest one and we complained about how this invention of technology is taking a crucial part away from our lives. Radio took away some part of our recreational slots while television took most of it and now social media made most us glued to it most of the time. We keep on complaining about these technologies which might be stopping us to get along with people and involve in direct communication but we should not forget about the moments they were created to make our lives easier. Better technology does not always ensure better emotional expressions but rather helps us to create a replica of our actual emotions and “digital emojis” and “widely accepted acronyms” are living examples of the technology born emotional responses.

It’s even quite interesting how we respond to emotions in social media. There is a popular culture of using Acronyms while engaging in a conversation in social media like AMA (Ask Me Anything), NBD (No Big Deal), BRB (Be Right Back), which became quite popular among the people that they have started using them in other forms of communications as well. I can recall an incident of one my colleagues used LOL whenever she comes across to anything funny. There are numerous instances when I found the students have used these popular acronyms in writings, which made me wonder about which path the communication evolving into.

Many scholars would present sufficient evidence on which they would argue on the degradation of linguistic usage due to these popular acronyms, I still believe the popularity lies in our inherent nature of using our intellect to evolve something that will take lesser time and effort to materialize the communication. While it is debatable whether we should or should not use such abbreviated form while engaging in communication beyond social media which is considered to be a formal form of communication, many people (especially students) would love using these popular abbreviations as it saves them times and effort to spell the entire word.

Another example can be the “emojis” after it originated in Japanese mobile phones in 1997, which became another symbol of depicting emotions. It’s easier, funnier, and largely acceptable. I wouldn’t deny the usage of emojis while I could express my feeling in words on many occasions but as I said the users can certainly put forward many excuses in his defend while using emoji instead of a full sentence or at least a word for it. The increasing popularity of emojis ignited the requirement among many developers to create and send your customized emoji across different platforms through applications. Where many of them allow creating customized emojis to represent different emotional responses of the sender.

The root success factor of these inventions lies in the likelihood and acceptance among the people and over time people get comfortable in using these while engaged in communication. Most likely, in future, we would welcome such innovations in our lives to make it as easier and enjoyable as possible while considering them as an integral part of our daily communications but when it comes to the quality of the content for communication, we would always find the existence of this dilemma that will keep on reminding us of our moral duties to our existence.