General Motors Co. Pulling Out Of Facebook

              GM Pulling Out of Facebook Name Institutional Affiliation   GM pulling out of Facebook General Motors Co. (GM), withdrew from Facebook advertising after identifying that the site had little impact on the consumers’ intent to purchase their vehicles. The move by GM exemplifies a move by many advertisers within the USA based on the premise if Facebook helps them to sell more products. The withdrawal by GM increased the doubts if Facebook was an appropriate marketing avenue for the company to increase the growth of other businesses. Facebook is among the popular social networking sites that have advanced the marketing capabilities by helping companies to target their regional consumers appropriately (O’Keeffe & Clarke-Pearson, 2011). The high number of users has made Facebook a strong marketing tool. The move by GM to cancel the $10 million advertising budget on Facebook just before the stock market launch raised controversy in social media marketing. Nevertheless, the capability of Facebook to facilitate networking and entertainment simultaneously has made it grow faster and increase the number of users substantially. Increased efficiency in Facebook marketing has attracted GM to engage in the platform with the intent of reaching target consumers (Blodget, 2012). Despite the withdrawal, the impact of social media as a marketing tool was evident with the sustained engagement of GM on Facebook, spending about $30 million on third-party advertising and engaging with the customers. Notably, GM competitors were thrilled with Facebook’s capability to advertise their products. The problem with Facebook was the lack of a model that could be employed consistently for successful marketing strategies or offer massive revenue for the advertisers to match the social media’s high number of users (Constantinides, 2014). Rather, GM withdrawal was centered on the perception that Facebook did not offer much attention to stakeholders involved in marketing like it did to enhance the user experience. Nevertheless, continued development and identification of such shortcomings have enhanced the focus of Facebook to enhance its advertising capabilities and enable companies to target specific consumers. The innovative marketing solution is perhaps the reason why GM is still reliant on Facebook to reach a wide range of consumers across the globe. These consumer-specific features have been adopted by various social media sites such as Twitter and Myspace. Social media marketing offers a platform where the companies such as GM can interact with the consumers on a network-based community. The use of this marketing approach is imperative to target the modern users who are actively engaged in information systems, especially social media. Subsequently, the social media sites such as Facebook offer an opportunity for hyper-reality, where the company can interact with the users as well as facilitate consumer-to-consumer communication (Patino, Pitta, & Quinones, 2012). The use of Big Data analysis has also been a growing trend in the use of social media. In this case, sophisticated software is used to gather and analyze data from the social media platforms. R...