In our digital age, social media marketing is a phenomenon that is only gaining momentum. There’s everything from full blown twitter and Facebook ad campaigns with celebrity endorsements designed to increase viewership and “followers” for large corporations such as Coca-Cola or 7 For All Mankind Jeans to your local wine shop just down the street. With all of the benefits of social media marketing, it is no wonder that it has caught on so quickly. Some of the benefits of using social media include the ability to communicate directly with customers, gaining their feedback to improve products; launching contests to spread the word about a new product; gaining VIP access to events such as klout scores; and leveraging celebrity endorsements via photos on instagram, a quick tweet, or even video uploads.

The 7 For All Mankind’s Facebook campaign even went so far as hiring James Franco to direct a series of videos to be released gradually allowing people to vote on the ending. They had a grand prize at the end in anticipation of the release of their newest style of jeans garnering over 300,000 followers on Facebook alone… who knew jeans could be so exciting? Most of all, social media marketing can be incredibly cheap, involving mostly just the cost of endorsements, video or photo shoot content.

Unlike print media and television, social media marketing is inclusive to all types of businesses from big to small. In part two, we will take a closer look at some of the downfalls of social media marketing and examine some real cases of where social media went extremely wrong.