This is how you advertise in the 21st century!

I recently read an article on Nydia Gunawan’s blog about how Ryan Smolkin, the founder of Smoke’s Poutinerie, used social media to market his business. Information and technological integration has had the reputation of high costs and low success rates. But people like Smolkin has proved otherwise by capitalizing the low cost of social media and influence it has on consumers.

Image taken from: http://www.local10.com/news/money/French-fry-joint-lures-customers-through-Facebook/-/1717308/22867418/-/ugy3vi/-/index.html

In my opinion, by using free and highly accessible social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, Smolkin managed to save advertising costs and achieve something that regular advertisements cannot.

Smolkin took advantage of the fact that both Facebook and Twitter are used by many users daily. By uploading things that would attract his target demographic, mainly news on sports, ideas for new recipes and events taking place in his company, he managed to transform a regular Twitter or Facebook page into a source of daily entertainment that his customers would want to be a part of. Its no wonder that the number of followers on the company’s Facebook page is constantly growing, and customers are now automatically befriending his Facebook page.

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Mobile payments, here we come!

eBay

Image taken from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24292894

Braintree was recently acquired by eBay Inc for $800 million in a bid to strengthen PayPal’s presence on mobile devices. Paypal, a subsidiary of eBay, is an online payment platform which facilitates money transfers online.

eBay plans to use Venmo, an application by Braintree which lets customers make payments via mobile deivices, as a platform for expansion into the mobile payments industry. Following the acquisition of Braintree, Venmo will be included in PayPal’s mobile payment capabilities.

For further details on how Venmo works, check out this video below!

I feel that the move to acquire Braintree was a solid one.This allowed eBay to  eliminate a competitor and gain an extra platform for its expansion. Since consumers tend to prioritize the convenience of products and services, smart phone applications would be the ideal market to target. Furthermore, since PayPal is currently one of the dominant online payment platforms, most consumers would be comfortable with its payment systems and be able to adapt to its mobile payment platform with ease. By merging two popular online and mobile payment platforms together, I am confident that eBay’s expansion into the mobile industry would be a huge success.

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