Social Networking and Marketing

It's surprising that social networking has developed into such a phenomenon.  "Blogging", "posting", "tweeting", "liking", "sharing", "tagging", "hash-tagging" have all become common verbs that are used in our everyday speech.  It has become more than just a network of profiles and virtual friendships, it has evolved into a medium for communication, exposure of new ideas, and it has become an efficient marketing and advertising platform for many corporations.

I remember when I first became acquainted with social networking.  I had a xanga account when I was 14 and it was considered something "cool" to create your own profile and post blogs about yourself.  Back then, it was really just another website where teenagers used to waste time and keep in touch with their buddies.  MySpace seemed to function very similarly, where it was mostly targeted at urban teenagers and upcoming bands who wanted to get some exposure. Then in 2005, Facebook entered the race and it went from being limited to only college-users to everyone.

According to danah m. boyd and Nicole B. Ellison, the expansion of communities that social networking allowed has prompted many corporations to invest time and money in creating, purchasing promoting and advertising using SNSs.  Suddenly SNSs has become more than just a platform for a user to keep updated in what their friends are doing, it has become a vital marketing tool.

I've noticed that most subway ads include the Facebook and Twitter and sometimes even a Blogger logo. Many of today's leading companies have invested a great amount of money and time in their social networking campaigns.  Over the summer, I interned for a small company, who's business was primarily to help high school kids get into college. I was in charge of their Facebook and Twitter accounts.  My role was to get as many Facebook "likes" and Twitter "followers" as I could.  The CEO and founder of the company I was working for actually encouraged me to follow the list of 1001 twitter users who will auto-follow you back. The experience was very confusing at first because personally, I don't care for the amount of friends I have on Facebook or how many followers I get on Twitter.  It seemed so useless and time-consuming because the people I was expected to follow were just spammers.  But I soon realized how important it was for a company to establish a good social network.  "Aldo's Shoes" has 651,848 likes on Facebook and 16,580 likes on Twitter. "Aldo's Shoes" is a well-known, popular and established shoe company. It didn't really matter that these followers were "real" or not. It's the numbers that count. Numbers matter.  The amount of likes and followers actually establish a level of credentials of a company. And so I followed as many twitter-following-spammers as I could and our numbers went from 50 to over 2000.

Social Networking has become a vital and necessary tool in today's market for advertising. Any upcoming band, small business, or activist group would most likely become successful if they establish a good social network within Facebook or Twitter.