Social Networking as a Marketing Tool
What is social networking? A social network is
characterized by a social structure of individuals or groups
of individuals tied together by sets of specific
interdependency types. These groups include values, visions,
friends, colleagues, weblinks, and blog entries. Social
Networking in terms of its application on the World Wide Web
is the building and validating processes of these social
networks by using social software applications. The purpose
of this is for advertisers or marketers to benefit from an
expanded consumer/client contact base. Most of the time,
these social networks act as customer relationship
management tools for small businesses and entrepreneurs
selling their products and/or services.
Social Networking began to flourish online when a lot of
social network services such as MySpace and Yahoo360˚allowed
users to take more control of the content that they can post
on their personal social profiles. Social Networking
services entertained the creativity and innovations of their
member users, in which such sites developed new technologies
that were capable of linking bigger and better technologies
into wider social networks. Because of this, there was a
collaboration of existing and emerging social networking
models.
Social networks, aside from being able to play a significant
role in many ways to the development of business networking,
are also beginning to be embraced by the medical community
as a global way of managing institutional knowledge or
information. These sites can now disseminate social
knowledge that highlights new medical breakthroughs.
Individual physicians or medical institutions are now able
to share and set new standards when it comes to healthcare
and medical products through these web portals. The role of
social networks is also of great interest to pharmaceutical
companies that are spending a huge amount of their marketing
funds for attempts to create influence over leaders of
medical social networks.
Different language groups and even countries have been
touched by the scope of social networking. Popular social
network sites have been replicated to cater to different
countries and languages. These social networking portals
have also extended to connecting a network of cross-country
students and faculty members in the academic world. Several
websites have also begun using social networking as a means
to spread social good – tackling environmental awareness
issues, aids and cancer prevention discussion groups, and
Volunteer Peace Corps groups along with theological and
Christian Community groups. These places provide users with
a means to interact with like minded community members and
thus find channels for their purposes.
Social Networking Services, in general terms, are web sites
designed for members to create and post content in the form
of profile pages primarily in order to communicate with each
other. Each social network uses a variety of features and
privacy controls to attract different groups of users and
networks.
Today, since social networking is a relatively new concept
to the industry, very few charge for membership fees. Social
networks earn and own profit through online advertising
and/or selling professional information and social
connections to large and small scale businesses. Social
Networks still have a lot to learn in terms of establishing
targeted advertising to their members.
A recent online research stated that more advertisers and
marketers are now making use of social networking sites to
apply suggestive influence and solicit brand advocates for
their benefit. By the year 2007, there were as many as 48%
of brand marketers deploying marketing tactics on different
social networking channels. This is where the “trust your
peers” concept comes into play. More often than not, friends
will influence one another when it comes to purchasing
decisions.
Rather than just trusting an advertisement which they see
online or anywhere else, social networkers will most likely
listen to their friends and even discuss about purchasing
decisions through message boards or online chat rooms.
Marketers have grasped this new norm of social networking
and have been able to catch on by engaging in several
tactics as seen on some social networking sites by the use
of skins, widgets, and forward-to-friend functionality to
spark engagement.
There are various ways where a marketer can show
participation in social networking sites. It may be in the
form of paid advertisement, a feedback or a comment to a
user dialogue, tagging or rating brands or creating custom
pages for their brands.
Through Social Networking, Marketers now have the ability to
predict client or consumer behavior by closely following the
trend or the hype of a certain group base. Marketers may in
turn also suggest certain products or services to their
chosen client base. But because of social networking, it
will seem that they are just like any other member user who
has come into the group to share ideas and have interesting
points and comments to share.
|
