Social Media Comparison Essay

The two companies that created these search engines have billions of dollars and numerous other resources at their disposal available for the research, the development and the innovation of their products or services. But even if you have all the funds in the world at your fingertips, if you have a bad brand image in the consumers eyes your brand will have extreme difficulty inserting itself in the market. So how does the public perceive these brands?

The public’s perception of these two products is very different. Most people see Google as ‘the’ search engine; people have grown up with it and its most people’s first stop when searching for something on the internet, in fact when people are unsure of something they’ll often use the expression

The two companies have both attempted to integrate social media in their continued attempts to one up their competitor. Google has made attempts to create its own social media site. Their attempt at social media has succeeded but only because it was forced upon people that use Google services as mentioned above it is seen as the joke of the social media world. Nevertheless Google+ is now an essential part of Google and is seamlessly integrated with all of the services and features that Google provide which overall improves the “Google experience” and now more and more people are starting to warm to it. Microsoft, instead, went on to join with an already existing and influential social media site. Bing has an exclusive partnership with social media behemoth Facebook. This different strategy favours Bing because the popularity and user base of Facebook is far greater than Google+. As a result of this exclusive alliance Bing have seen an increase in popularity as they start to profit of the Facebook population which exceeds a billion

Bing are constantly trying to attract more consumers, this is noticeable by the amount of money that goes towards their marketing budget which stood at $100million in 2012. Bing uses 3 main marketing techniques; firstly they promote Bing via adverts for other Microsoft products like the Internet Explorer 9 advert which while demonstrating the fluidity and speed of their internet browser showed many pages of Bing searches making sure that the Bing logo is easily visible. Secondly Bing sponsors popular events and gives information and insight into the events to attract entertainment fans and improve the brand’s image by associating themselves with certain celebrities. One such event was the Sundance film festival where Bing gave its users a unique view of the festival with livestreams of the event bringing the experience to all of their users. Finally they point out the differences between their brand and Google and demonstrating their superiority either by showing their “superior” connectivity thanks to their partnership with Facebook or by directly comparing themselves to Google and demonstrating that people prefer Bing in a blind test which was re-launched for a second time as “Bing it on” and has proven more successful for Bing this time around according to their