Digital and Social Media in Social Marketing: Trends, Challenges, and Opportunities

The new age of communication made possible by digital and social media platforms presents significant opportunities for organizations to reach and engage audiences especially in the realm of social marketing. The aim of social marketing is to encourage behaviour and activities that will benefit society in general. For example, health awareness, safety, environment, and education. Many platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and short-video apps create opportunities for creating campaigns, to increase outreach, encourage engagement as well as have an interactive communication channel. While information can spread very widely using these digital social marketing platforms, it is not yet confirmed if there will be a real change in behavior. The study adopted a descriptive and analytical research design. Through a structured questionnaire distributed to 145 respondents who actively use social media platforms, primary data was collected. The questionnaire measured social media usage patterns of the respondents, perception towards social marketing campaigns, trust on digital messages, and likelihood to act after exposure to social marketing campaigns. The collected data were then analyzed using the descriptive statistics, percentage analysis, chi-square test, and regression analysis to study the relationship between the demographic factor, format of campaign, trust, and engagement behaviour. The results suggest that digital and social media formats have become extremely popularized for social marketing campaigns. However, audience responses to popular formats like short video, influencer message, and interaction tool have been varied. A lot of respondents were neutral or skeptical toward these trends, as they feel simply using trending formats does not lead to better engagement. Moreover, the findings indicate that a user’s age does not significantly affect one’s attention level toward short videos and engagement with the gamified feature. Misinformation and credibility issues were equally identified as major factors affecting audience trust in social media campaigns.