Social media advertising

I am starting a business that produces its product based on customer opinion that is collected via a website. How effective is word of mouth proliferation over online social media for spreading the word of a business like this? Is it unsafe for word of mouth to dominate my marketing strategy?

It is a proven fact that people are far more likely to purchase based upon recommendations from friends they know via social media. If you are able to get a positive buzz about your site going on various social media sites like Facebook and Twitter then it could help immensely.

Just remember it is not about what you say or post, it is all about what others say and post about you.

One of the most important things to keep in mind is the size of your audience. If your pool is small and you have collected only 10 responses that are recommending you to do something it may not be that effective.

However if you have received 20,000 responses and they are recommending you to do something, then that speaks a lot louder.

Building the right community will be a key to any success in this type of endeavor. Some other pieces of thought: How nimble will you be to move based on these recommendations you are receiving? The worst possible fail in Social is to ask, build buzz then never deliver.

Problem is: you can't control word of mouth at all.

Asking if word of mouth is more effective let's think that you want to act in a marketing way for controlling word of mouth. You just can't.

If your product is spreading via word of mouth that's just great (unless your product suc*s and word of mouth is negative, but this is rare, if product is bad people just won't talk about it).

The only unsafe side of word of mouth is if too many people use your product too early and your technical platform can't handle this ton of new users.

So do your marketing actions, and just hope for the maximum resonance on social medias, because in fine it's good for your product.

Word of mouth dominating your marketing strategy really means you don't plan to do much marketing. Word of mouth isn't marketing, it's a nice side benefit from having a good product/service. That's okay, but don't fool yourself that it's part of your marketing strategy.

If you want to grow faster, more marketing will help. It's not like any effort you put into marketing will be at the cost of word of mouth as they aren't mutually exclusive.

So I think the real answer is do as much marketing as you can, it will help you grow quicker.