Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Social Networking

A social networking service focuses on building online communities of people who may share certain interests or activities. There are so many different social networking sites in this day in age and they have everything to do with the advertising industry and advertising and promotions. Some examples are Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, AIM, iMeem, Live Journal, and many, many more. Some of these social networking sites are to keep people in touch that they may not have seen or heard from in a while. Currently, there are over 400 million active users on Facebook. That is a lot of people on one site and it is a clean easy target for advertising on almost anything people could think of. According to Wikipedia almost all social networking sites are web based, which means that they require user interaction either through Internet such as e-mail and instant messaging.

Facebook is one of the most growing social networking sites in America. Like I stated earlier they currently have over 400 million active users as of right now and more and more people are joining everyday. According to some statistics found about Facebook on their actual site, about fifty percent of those 400 million users log on at least every day. About 1.5 million businesses have active pages on Facebook. Whether or not people want to believe it, Facebook is a major way for getting advertising out on the market for particular companies. Facebook bases your personal information on your profile page off of the ads that they post along the side tab to try and promote. More than likely someone my age with my information they are going to put up advertisements for UGG’s or clothing stores they may think I will like and certain things like that just so they know they are targeting the right audience. However, those ad’s on the side tab of your Facebook page do a good job of promoting their products but when you actually click on it, there are a lot of steps you have to go through in order to actually see the product or win whatever type of prize they told you that you would win. So in that aspect I think Facebook is trying to scam us but it doesn’t take away from the fact of them doing good advertising and promotions for that particular product or service.

Once more companies realize the importance of social networking and relating it to their campaigns, the more popular it will become. I would say it already is pretty popular but within a few years I believe social networking is going to take over advertising. People are not going to want to waste their money on other forms of advertising when they can get their name out there into the public, a much easier way, online. Some may say that Facebook and Twitter are basically giving some company’s free advertising, however, there are still people who pay to do this, or get paid I should say. Someone is getting paid to post information about their company on the Internet so technically it is not free. But it is definitely cheaper than other forms of advertising. Now I am not saying that social networking is going to be the only type of advertising in a few years but I believe it will be a major form of advertising. People can do almost anything online these days and that is a scary thought.

1 comment:

  1. I agree, I think that once advertisers realize the popularity of Facebook and other social media sites that they will change up their campaign to fit this mew market. It is changing the way that people advertise because everyone has such a short attention span when it comes to advertisements that they do not want to read a long book about something they may want to buy, they want something quick that is relevant to them and that is what Facebook allows advertisers to do.

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