Social Media
Social Networking
Social Networking, as with all other areas of Social Media, got its Juggernauts. The once Dominant MySpace is now a distance second to Facebook, the site that seems to have broken down all barriers, whether they be demographic or geographic, since its original inception in 2004 as a way for students from Harvard University to communicate.
Concentrating first on Facebook, although primarily a personal site, rather than professional site, there are two major ways in which a company may wish to conduct business. The first is through Facebook’s fairly recent addition, advertising in the sidebar, although I myself have never used their advertising setup I have heard good things from those who have. For around $5 a day you can have your advertisements targeted at people who have specified in their ‘interests’ section that they are interested in similar areas. Examples are adverts selling sporting goods for people who have indicated that they are passionate about sports, or online dating adverts for those listed as single.
The other way for a business to operate on Facebook is to create a ‘fan’ page, these allow people who know about you to become a fan and contribute to discussions on your wall or post product pictures and such. Another advantage of this approach is that you are able to send updates, similar to email blasts, to all of your fans at once alerting them of product sales or other important information. Savvy companies have, in the past, used these fan pages as a place to launch competitions, such as BMW’s design your own car, this helped create more of a buzz about their brand and encourage potential customers to interact with them in ways that they previously hadn’t done.
Social Networking is advancing at a fast rate and now a company called Ning offer users the ability to create their own social networks about things that they are interested in. I myself are a member of a few, one being the example to the left of the Americymru network, a network for Welsh people living in North America. Obviously the ability to create your own network gives companies the chance to create a network dedicated purely to themselves and gather fans who are interested about them and either bounce ideas off of them through the means of polls and questionnaires, or to create anticipation ahead of a product launch, much like Apple does.
Basically social networking on some level is a must for companies, it allows them to identify and interact with new potential customers, it allows them to build hype and anticipation over there products through online advertising campaigns or competitions and it also allows an awful lot of free market research which is something that should never be underrated.
