Social media users has been increasing significantly for the past few years. Consumers has been actively present in social media from Facebook and Twitter to Instagram and Youtube. Many people have their own reasons and purposes to get involved in these platforms. Some people utilise it to entertain themselves and acquire information while others use it as a place to express themselves and bring people together as a community.
Given the enormous impact of social media that resonates with people, companies have decided to incorporate social media as a part of their business strategy. Companies have pulled out business model where their venture can bring value to their customer.
Coca Cola has been successful in their business in their own way. Coca Cola came up with an idea of a campaign called “Open Happiness“. The theme of the campaign highlighted about the feeling of joy and spread the happiness with Coca Cola. “Open Happiness” campaign was merged with “Share a Coke” campaign which convey on how Coca Cola can bring happiness and joy when people share it at the same time.
Furthermore, the campaign employed promotion technique such as “Hug Machine” where the vending machine will give the people free Coke on whoever hug the machine. Coca Cola has brought experiential value to people by spreading happiness and joy to consumer.
Customer satisfaction has been the main focus of Apple when it comes to create products and services. Customer satisfaction drives viral word-of-mouth which has been the main cause of the success of Apple’s business model from time to time. Moreover, customer satisfaction will generate customer’s loyalty and value towards the brand. Customer are willing to invest and pay for it.
Consequently, Apple has reaped a revenue reaching $590B/yr and has a potential to triple their annual revenue with their existing products. Adding services, such as Apple Music, App Store, iTunes and iCloud storage enhance incremental value for customers and accumulate high revenue for Apple.
Apple has managed to bring fundamental value to customer. By concentrating on customer satisfaction and their capabilities to demonstrate through their well-functioned products and beautiful design, Apple has succeed to execute great performance and achieve great outcome.
Companies have been improving their business models to help them stay in the game and maintain their success. Guardian has shifted their business model by reaching and appealing their readers to contribute whether as subscribers, donors or members to build reader relationship and revenue.
As a result, Guardian has reaped 800.000 contributors (members, subscribers, donors) that has been making monthly payments under the membership scheme. These readers contribute more than the advertising itself.
Conversely, Netflix has acquired success by using social media, particularly Twitter to help them spread the word of mouth. Netflix is more favourable to produce viral content that gives sustainable advantage than traditional networks and on-demand providers such as Amazon Prime Video and Hulu.
New Netflix original shows accumulate over 30 percent more mentions on Twitter compare to new shows on network or cable television. Furthermore, Netflix is not assessed on viewership ratings which help the new shows to gather large audience. Thus, a mention in social media can enhance customer perception and accrue new subscribers to the platform.
It is true that some of the biggest companies in the world like Coca Cola and Apple have been successful in their business with their own strategy. However, it is inevitable that social media gives huge incentive for companies to promote their venture as it will be able to reach and appeal more target audience.
Ergo, companies need to incorporate social media into their business strategy hence company will have a big picture on what the target audience needs and build the business models accordingly. Companies should also discover what value that their business can deliver to their customer where customer will gain the benefit and experience at the same time.
As always, feel free to comment anything that might confuse you or if you have other perspective about some of the points indicated above. I will be very pleased to answer any of your doubts. Thanks for reading my blog. Have a great day.
Sarah Erfina's Blog 
I think social media is a great way for people to get access to reach out and companies to understand consumers. As consumers now spend most of their time using social media.
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Yes, I am very delightful that you agree with my claim and perspective. Social media is indeed the great platform to connect, interact and understand the target audience. And as you said, as many people now spend most of their time in social media, company should take advantage of this phenomenon and utilise the platform effectively to ease the process of selling product and reap profits from the sales.
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This is a very good article, keep it up!
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can you elaborate more on your opinion? Which part of the article that you find good and other part that is not good enough? It would be very helpful for me to fix the lack part which will help me improve my article and also the next few articles that i will be going to publish.
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Interesting article! I agree with the use of social media as a great platform to reach and appeal to the target audience.
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Thank you for the good feedback. I am so glad that you understand and agree with my point of view or perspective. I would kindly help you if you have any doubts or disagreements with any other claims that will be advantageous for my personal growth and improvement and also for your knowledge.
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Great article, personally I agree with the facts that company these days have change their focus mainly to social media. It is a very good strategy indeed
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Absolutely. Companies have learned from their mistake and have been making great improvement for the past decade. It is a very smart tactic for them to incorporate social media in their Digital Marketing Strategy to help them enhance their businesses and share information with their target audience thus the customer may not miss any trends or new features that the company has invented.
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great article! what is your favorite business model among the brands you mentioned above?
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Thank you for being curious and asking this question. Personally, i like subscription model the most at the moment. With a lot of digital platform like YouTube, Netflix, Spotify and Disney+ that has been adopting membership scheme in the recent years, i find that the subscription strategy has made them very successful in their business. For the great amount that the customers have to pay to become a member of these platform, they make the money worth for it by providing customer with numerous benefits that customer will be able to enjoy and will not regret such as free-ads, skip many songs as you want and binge-watching the content whenever and wherever you want along with the feature of downloading the content offline hence people can even watch the content without wireless network.
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Very interesting article. I agree with you as social media is widely used and can be an effective platform for business to reach the target group. Keep it up!
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Yes, you’re absolutely correct. Social media is a great platform to reach the target audience. Companies have been capable to utilise social media to market their product and enhance their businesses.
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The article is a great example om how useful social media is as a tool to create a target audience for a product, but I feel as though many companies do not exploit social media to its fullest potential. Many use the same kind of marketing catered toward the general ‘social media users’. I feel as though there are many creative ways to market there but companies struggle to find them, and that is truly where most of them lack. That is, ofcourse, just my opinion. Great blog btw!
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Yes, i get your point. Many companies have exploited social media just at the surface without trying to identify the breadth and depth of this platform. Truthfully, if they invest their time and effort to learn more about social media, they are able to maximise its fullest potential and appeal to more target audience. I hope that companies will be able to obtain clarity about these issues and eventually manage to build business model accordingly to help them sustain their businesses in the near future. Thanks for the substantial insight about this topic, Abi. Now, I get to learn new things and gain more knowledge from your perspective. I will give my best to incorporate this idea in my next post.
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