Social Networking in Marketing

Social Networking in Marketing

Marketing is the process of communicating the value of a product or service to customers, for the purpose of selling that product or service. In another word, it can be advertising for selling.

Traditional advertising approaches are advertisements on television, radio or newspaper. Generally speaking, when you want to buy something and there are so many choices that you don’t know which one to buy, you will definitely buy the one you are most familiar with. At that time the power of marketing appears: if you have seen an advertisement of some product before, you are more likely to buy the one you have seen the advertisement before. In this case, an advertisement is the stimulus event and individual firstly perceive it; next the perceiver needs to encode and interpret this perception. For instance, if an advertisement is so funny that it makes a costumer laugh, then the costumer will have an initial memory of the product. When it comes to so many choices and he/she don’t which to buy, and he/she sees the product that he/she saw the advertisement before, then prior knowledge stored in memory is retrieved and it will leads to a behavioral response, that is he will buy the one he have saw an advertisement before.

A new form of advertising that is growing rapidly is social network advertising. It is online advertising with a focus on social networking sites. A blog can be a good channel for social media marketing, when it allows the company to have a transparent platform wherein the customer is able to interact with the company and learn more about the company(in another word, company can advertise within a specific crowd who are interested in their products). Friendertising is another way of social network advertising. Let me take Candy Crush for instance, individuals need lollipops to open a level of the game. There are two ways to achieve a lollipop: buy one or advertise the game to eight of your friends on social platform. It is a wonderful style of marketing, because either way can make profit for the company. Besides the advertisement from the one we are familiar with is a more precise advertising term in which people are able to direct advertisements toward others directly using social network services.

Social network advertising is a relatively immature market, but it has shown a lot of promise as advertisers are able to take advantage of the demographic information the user has provided to the social networking site.