A social network service focuses on building and reflecting of social networks or social relations among people, e.g., who share interests and/or activity
As you can see it’s a very broad topic. I will explain how it works in the interests of most consumer product marketers and the relationship of social networking to their consumers.
Today’s 12-24 year old consumers have grown up with traditional marketing and have effectively blocked its ability to coerce decision making. Today’s young people are highly sensitive to trending topics (cool) things, and it’s very difficult for product companies to advertise that their products are “cool”. Today’s young people rely on their peers for purchasing decisions more than ever before. To attract this market you have to push information into the peer groups, the peer groups will do all of the leg work. The problem is how do you get your products into these peer groups. This is where social networking is powerful.
Social networking tools such as Facebook or Twitter are hugely popular with the 12-24 year old age group. Many users are constantly on their electronic devices keeping up with friends and importantly trends. To take advantage of social networking, product companies need to provide trending news, facts, and opinion via Facebook and Twitter. But you can’t just publish press releases. Companies must present their news in a fashion where it will be interesting and trusted. One example: Sponsoring a racecar driver who “tweets” (how you post an article on twitter) about your product and connects their followers with your twitter page. The racecar driver fans now think that your product is cool, they trust the racecar driver.
These type of social networking strategies requires a constant stream of updates to stay relevant. To have a successful social marketing campaign requires at least one news/trend/opinion article to be written daily, if not more often.
