Online Marketing of Mobile Telephone Industry - Article Example

The industry that will be discussed in this essay is the mobile telephone industry. Companies today, including those in the mobile telephone industry utilize various social media platforms to increase their market share. Some of the common social media platforms used by companies are Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, and Digg (Swee, 2012).

Samsung, a global mobile phone leader is one company which employs social media to build up its customer base. Samsung uses an official Twitter and Facebook account in announcing its new products. An example of this is when Samsung posted photos of its billboards on its Twitter account (Sadauskas, 2013). Furthermore, it showed photos of their flash dance event in Times Square “Be ready 4 the next Galaxy” on Twitter (Sadauskas, 2013). Aside from Twitter, Samsung also uses Facebook to boost its sales. The company posted a teaser picture of its Smartphone on Facebook (Sadauskas, 2013). It is very evident that Samsung extensively uses social media to promote its products. Their social media campaign even comes ahead of the actual launch of their Smartphones (Sadauskas, 2013).

To increase their followers on Twitter, Samsung has encouraged their fans to tweet with the #Unpacked hashtag to create an event buzz and push their marketing campaign (Boies, 2013). Proof that Samsung is successfully using social media is the number of followers they have on Twitter and Facebook. It has 20 million followers on Twitter and 15 million Facebook fans (Turner, 2013). According to mobiThinking, a resource for global digital mobile marketing agencies, the reason why Samsung is number one in mobile phones because they “fit their mobile strategy to suit consumer choice” (Turner, 2013). The Vivaldi Partners Group says that the secret to the success of Samsung Mobile’s digital marketing success is their “use and understanding of social currency or the degree to which customers share a brand or information about a brand with others”, which is the use of a social media strategy (Turner, 2013). This is the reason why Samsung has moved forward as compared to its competitors such as Sony and Nokia.  Samsung effectively makes use of the six degrees of social currency which are affiliation, conversation, information, advocacy, utility and identity (Turner, 2013).