Free Essay on the Theme of Subversive Frivolity as a Social Media Marketing

The technological developments have brought numerous changes in the way we view things in the 21st century. Top among those is the introduction of the internet, and along with it the many aspects the have brought changes in the various angles of everyday life. The social media for example that was introduced in the first decade of the century has dramatically impacted the typical day to day activities in a manner that could not have been imagined in the last century. The impacts of social media cannot be overstated in any way, both positive and negative. Those impacts touch on many fields such as business and personal social lives. To top it all, the social media scene has been continuously changing over time, with new features and developments being witnessed with each passing day. While in the beginning the social media was mostly used for social interactions, it has in the recent past evolved to become a significant business and marketing tool. Social sites such as Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook lead in this category and have over time become a big part of our everyday life, with millions of users across the globe. In the paper, we analyzed their application in business and marketing.

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The concept of subversive frivolity as explained by Abidin(2016,1) has been proven by many types of research to be a useful tool in marketing and social media influencing. It mostly entails the underestimated power an object that is viewed by many as useless or unproductive due to its marginal discursive framework. As such, objects that are not readily discerned by the public to be consequential could, in fact, bear more power than anticipated, and generate a level of results that might not be easily imagined(Abidin). This tool has been extensively employed by social media influencers over the years to achieve magnificent results in fields such as business, marketing, and many other fields. Some of the tools that are included in the use of subversive frivolity include those such as memes, tweets, and general funny testimonials. This paper looks at how such items are used upon to capitalize on business and marketing in the recent times through sites such as Instagram, twitter, and facebook.

Highly Visual Images

One of the most effective tools used in online marketing today is pictures. The marketers use various tricks to ensure that their pictures generate the maximum impact. The quality and visual emphasis of the photographs used greatly influence the level of impact they would finally achieve. The picture quality and visual emphasis however are one of the aspects much overlooked in the social media field. Most users of social media sites such as the Instagram handles fail to grasop how much their inbuilt taste for excellent quality and highly pictures might attract them to the intended target of the marketers. Using highly visual images is one of the most efficient online marketing tools as they engage their intended targets on a level that generates interest on the subject albeit without the viewer's full realization. Take a food marketing firm, for example, trying to market their products on a social site. Their use of highly visual images displaying their product would engage a user viewing the products to a level of making them potential customers(Figure 1).

Figure 1. Crate and barrel food advertisement on instagram. Source; https://www.instagram.com/p/BSWO-ZaB24O/?utm_source=ig_embed

In the above figure, Crate and Barrel employ highly visual imagery of food, drinks, and groceries to attract viewers. The impact this particular image generates is evident from the number of likes and the replies it attracted. Despite being a simple image that could be viewed as just another regular Instagram image, it manages to engage the viewers to the point of attracting over 3500 likes and a trendy discussion by the users and thus generating interest in the company. This notwithstanding the fact that many of the users liking it might not know what exactly drew them to the image in the first place. This is an example thus of just how the use of highly visual images can be used to stimulate a users interest and thus to market the company and its business.

Humour And Light-Hearted Content

The use of humor and light-hearted content on social sites as a marketing tool is also another feature that might be underrated by many users. Online marketers and influencers employ this technique cunningly by engaging their followers on a close personal level and thus making them feel like part of their personal lives. Cater Wilkinson for instance; a social media influencer employs this technique to market Wendy's in the example below(Figure 2).

Figure 2

In his tweet, Cater Wilkerson makes a joke to his followers asking them to retweet and get a chance to eat free chicken nuggets at Wendy's restaurant for a year. This ploy is a deliberate attempt to encourage his followers to become customers of the restaurant, given that The Wendy's handler is among the list of followers and even chips in the ensuing conversation. The simple tweet gets more than 3.6 million retweets, with over a million others liking it. By engaging his followers in a light-hearted manner, he manages to influence a substantial number of his 18 million followers to gaain an interest on Wendy's restaurant and its products through their tweets and retweets about the chicken nuggets, despite many of them only making jokes about the tweet. This shows just how powerful such marketing techniques could be.

Using Engaging Questions

The value of the level of engagement in marketing through social media might be significantly overlooked and even seen by as time-consuming among other things. This notion is informed by the fact that many users are mainly busy people with different lives outside the platforms. Furthermore, the level of anonymity and invisibility that social sites afford the users might encourage them to act irrationally in their comments and conversations. Having a user engage with a marketer on an extensive level might thus be seen as an effort that might not produce any significant result. On the other hand, however, engagement can be a great marketing tool when applied correctly in Figure 3 below.

Figure 3;

The image presented in figure 3 is an example of how using engaging questions can be applied in marketing. The company handler @wholefoods administrator in the case asks the followers to guess the ingredients used to make the foodstuff as an attempt to engage them on a personal level, and they respond to the question by engaging the handler on a guessing spree. This way the focus on the product being marketed is blurred as the conversation continues. The principle aim however of posting the image is not taken away from the entire picture as the respondents continuously see the image while continuing to engage the marketer. The result is that it ends up generating interest on the company's products and, therefore, a market is created. The evidence of this is the interest the respondents get and which keeps them glued to the conversation, seen here with 44 people liking it and 24 others actively engaging in the ensuing discussion. Despite the possibility of attracting negative comments and engagement from the respondents, the marketer succeeds in taking their products to a broader audience. It is the thoughtful questions thus that ends up eliciting results here, and proves to be a useful tool for marketing on the platform.

User-Generated Content

Many social media users might find themselves undervaluing a product or brand name when they view them as robots or unreachable on a human level. This is most common with big brands that engage their fans and followers in a manner that may be deemed too formal. As a result, the fans and followers might fail to establish a connection with them to a level that motivates them to continue being friends or following the brand. Take a company like Urban Outfitters for example, which has many followers and fans of their products. Giving the followers a chance to generate their content and post them through their handler could improve the marketing of their products in social sites such as Instagram, which supports such features as in Figure 4 below.

Figure 4; Urban outfitters instagram handle

In the image (Figure 4), @UrbanOutfittersMen has given their followers a chance to post their picture wearing company brand's product through its handler. This way, the marketer succeeded in making a close level connection with the users and followers on Instagram. The ploy generates an interest in the company's products by making the fans feel that at least there is a human behind the handler, instead of just the regular formal advertisements and engagements they may have been used to. Furthermore, many more users of the company's products might in be interested in posting their pictures too through the @UrbanOutfittersMen brands handle, and thus a broader market is created for the products at the end since they would assist the company in the marketing process. Though the use such techniques may be deemed by many Instagram users to be unproductive and a waste of time, the figure above demonstrates that it can be used to give fans and followers a new and exciting experience, and thus end up being a useful marketing tool. This notion is evident in the way the simple image ends up generating likes more than 100,000.

The social media scene as we have seen in the above study has evolved to accommodate many aspects and marketing techniques. The use of social sites such as Instagram, twitter, facebook and others in the marketing of products might be underrated by many of the users and dismissed for one reason or another. The application of smart techniques as those we have seen here, however, prove to be efficient in selling company and brands products online when used correctly. The use of subversive frivolity in marketing should, therefore, be considered by marketers wishing to increase their market reach due to its many benefits as we have seen in our analysis above.