Effect of social network in today mass communication - Research Paper Example

By using social networks as mass communication marketing tools, companies around the world are able to interact with their customers and advertise their products like never before. To understand how social media marketing works as a mass communication marketing tool, the importance of the Internet must be realized. “With nearly 260 million people using the Web on a regular basis in the United States alone, using the Internet has become a mainstream social activity. Consumers approach purchasing online differently, too, and as a result, you need to approach your marketing online differently as well,” (Singh, 2010).

What Singh describes here is important to note. The number of users on the internet is astronomically high, and getting higher each day. As a result, the internet is seen as a perfect place to advertise products and utilize marketing practices, since such an audience is present. Social networks are crucial to this. According to a study conducted in June 2010, nearly 80% of the United States internet population uses social networks (Heras, 2010). The top 10 social networks used as of March 2010 are Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Linkedin, Classmates, MyLife, Ning, LiveJournal, Tagged, and Last.

fm, with Facebook receiving 133,623,529 unique visits daily and Last.fm receiving 3,473,978 unique visits daily (Nations, 2010). With the amount of time and the amount of people on social networks today, it has become not only important, but nearly necessary for companies to reach out to their online audience and extend their marketing plans to include them. Advertising to the online audience of a given company or brand is not the same as traditional advertising. “…advertising has traditionally been viewed as one way communication, delivered from the marketer using ads through some media vehicle to a receiver, the target audience.

Thinking of advertising as one-way communication limits what is possible, particularly online,” (Tuten, 2008). Social networks are all about communication: people getting in touch with long lost friends and family members, keeping in touch with the friends you already have, and in some cases, making new friends. From a business perspective, businesses must find a way to make themselves part of the communication. “Online, advertising becomes more about conversations, connections, and shared control and less about passive consumption of packaged content,” (Tuten, 2008).

Brands join in on the communication by interacting with their customers using these social networks. On Facebook, brands create fan pages, where their brand can be “liked” by their customers. These fan pages have various ways in which they can engage customers to communicate. Many fans simply comment the fan pages, talking about a favorite product or an experience with the product. From there, the brand is responsible to monitor these comments and respond to them, with at least a simple thank you.

The more they elaborate on their responses to comments, the more they can engage customers in conversation and develop a relationship between the customer and the brand. This can also be done by creating engaging status updates, where they encourage customers to share with them. This allows the customers to feel like they are contributing to a brand and that their voice is being heard. From there, it is largely in the customer’