Social Media

Lastly, the firm will minimize cost and save time by using social media as the marketing system. According to Kaplan and Norton, a company need to build up a vision by using the 4 perspectives of balance scorecard. Financial perspectives of balance scorecard indicate whether the company’s strategy, implementations and execution are contributing to bottom-line improvement. For this perspective company need to control their operating cost such as choosing wisely the most cost-effective marketing system. In this case, social media has granted a firm to use technology and electronic word of mouth to minimise costs and save time.

Compare to traditional marketing (television, printed ads, magazine, radio etc.), social media marketing has low-cost.  The costs of social media ads can start from free to several hundred dollars per mounts depend on the size of companies. Social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest allow companies to promote and share content with no cost outside of the personal time spent or hire a marketing agency. According to Kooser, “it shouldn't cost any more than $500 a month, per restaurant to hire agency to manage social media ads. The agency handles Twitter updates daily, Facebook page updates several times a week, and responds to customer comments.” (Kooser, 2014).  In contrast, the cost traditional marketing is very high especially prime time’s television ads. According to a post of the economist prime time on October 14, 2013, shows that the cost of 30 second ad on television channels is ranged from $19,333 to $326,260 depends on the popularity of the show and it is just the cost of one-time ads (Lisa, 2013). According to Chris Mercer, who has a sales and marketing background that stretches over 20 years, the cost to reach 2000 audience of traditional marketing are radio $150, newspaper $250, magazine $500, and direct mail $900 whereas social media is only $75.

 In addition, Constant Contact conducted a survey in 2011 on to small business owners and employees, small business using social media as marketing system because it is low cost and not time-consuming. Within 1972 respondents, across a range of business-to-business and business-to-consumer industries, 83% using social media marketing because it is low cost (Constant Contact Survey: Major Shift in Small Businesses' Willingness to Deploy Social Media Marketing, 2011). The interview that our group conducted to 10 people in different fields about the influences of social media, shows that 10 out of 10 stated that social media is cost-effective marketing strategy.

As social media is available 24/7 to everyone in the world, companies can have fast actions and fast results. For example, if the company has new product to promote and wants to get some feedbacks, company can simply just post or update in their social media which will immediately available to viewers. The survey of Constant Contact also shows that there is 45% responded that they use social media as marketing because it doesn’t take a lot of time (Constant Contact Survey: Major Shift in Small Businesses' Willingness to Deploy Social Media Marketing, 2011). According to the “2015 Social Media Marketing Industry Repot”, a significant 64% of marketers are using social media for 6 hours weekly and more than haft of them reported 6 hours per week provides significant sale improvement (Micheal, 2015).