Social Networking Unravelled

The social networking revolution that has taken place over the past few years has taken many of us by surprise. The way that individuals and businesses now interact has been fundamentally changed, and there will doubtless soon be a time when we can no longer imagine communication with one another in the absence of these networks.

Connections

Social networking gives people and companies the ability to make connections with huge numbers of people across the globe on a scale never before imagined. The emergence and growth of the Web itself naturally had a massive impact on the scale of people that we as individuals and businesses were able to communicate with easily. However the various social networking and media developments that have taken place more recently have had even more of an impact.

Via social networks, online communities and social media such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube and Flickr, people and businesses are making new kinds of connection and communicating in fundamentally new ways.

Contexts

As well as reaching people through the ‘traditional’ Internet mediums such as browsing the Web on a desktop or laptop computer, social media and networks are now reaching people in many different contexts. The recent advance of mobile devices such as netbooks and smartphones has allowed social networking to play a role throughout the everyday lives of people, and of course businesses.

Marketing

Social media marketing has naturally sought to take advantage of these developments in communication, with a coherent online marketing campaign now regarding social networks and media as a vital element.

As well as traditional advertising carried out through these new types of media, such as adverts embedded in Web and application content, e.g. mobile apps, marketing efforts have employed a raft of new ways to connect with people.

Social marketing therefore uses a variety of methods to make the best use of these new communication avenues and tools to represent brands and businesses within the social media world.

Viral

At its most basic, a social media approach to marketing will utilise the available networks to create buzz, orchestrating viral campaigns that can often reach immense numbers of people within very short periods of time. In many cases, these campaigns will not actually be targeted towards presenting a particular product or service, but will form part of an overall branding effort.

Brands

Further to this, social media is commonly now used as a fundamental tool in the branding processes for a company or indeed individual. The various types of social network provide the opportunity for a brand to be expressed in innumerable different ways and using the best of all of the available media formats, from simple text to image, sound and of course video.

Dialogue

Because the nature of social networking is interaction and conversations between people and businesses, the impact of any marketing is naturally greater. The most effective campaigns encourage the customers themselves to take the lead in the communication process, and therefore represent a two-way dialogue between brand and customer.