Social Media Backgrounder

 I.        Executive Summary

Social media is quickly becoming one of the widest reaching forms of advertising in the American market. According to the 2008 Cone Business in Social Media Study, “sixty percent of Americans use social media, and of those, 59 percent interact with companies on social media Web sites. According to the survey, 93 percent of social media users believe a company should have a presence in social media, while an overwhelming 85 percent believe a company should not only be present but also interact with its consumers via social media. In fact, 56 percent of users feel both a stronger connection with and better served by companies when they can interact with them in a social media environment.” While this may seem to just be a bunch of statistics, the numbers make an overwhelmingly solid argument that our brand, Dos Equis, could benefit highly from trying to reach customers through social media, and to maximize effectiveness of this endeavor, to make it interactive in some way.

My research shows that, aside from Facebook and Twitter, YouTube is a highly effective form of social media. According to Alexa Web Information (a website traffic monitoring service), approximately 20% of global internet users visit YouTube on a daily basis. On top of that, YouTube works seamlessly in conjunction with the other social media sites (Facebook and Twitter) and its content can be shared on them. So in actuality, with YouTube, you potentially have access to all of YouTube’s audience, all of Facebook’s audience, and all of Twitters audience. If we could somehow combine YouTube’s widespread use with some form of interactivity and apply it to our brand, then through social media, we could maximize the exposure of our brand.

 II.       Background

In this new era of internet development, users have been expressing a need to be as connected as they can be, as often as possible. Cell phones were able to satisfy this need temporarily with the introduction...