Social Networks and Their Usages: 

The popular and common social media marketing tools are Twitter, blogs, Myspace, LinkedIn, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube. Those sites give users the ability to share, enjoy and track anything that they would like their peers to see. Facebook is one of the most common social net works by which users can connect to their friends, share their photos and stories anytime. According to the statistics from facebook press room, Facebook has more than 300 million active users around world and 50% of active users log on to it in any given day. Myspace and Friendster focus on the aspects of staying in touch with friends, meeting new people online and sharing ideas. Flickr is just a simple tool for users to share their photos. Here is a vedio which explains what is social network.

 Social Network Marketing:

People have changed from just searching for information on line to creating and joining in social networks with other people through internet. In social network, users can be defined to a group with similar interests and likes. Social network assists users to get rid of the barriers of traditional communication which is physical location. Nowadays, social networks attracts more and more marketers’ attention because of large user base. A lot of well known companies are using social net works to spread their marketing message and get visitors to their websites. Marketers use social network applications to glow endorsements for their business and products. The profile of their companies, products and their messages can be shared and checked by billions of network users. Top Ten Secrets to Social Network Superstardom introduces some tips for marketers in order to do social network marketing efficiently. The video give more insight of rules for social network marketing.

What Works and What Don’t:

Some social network users are influenced by the purchase of their friends. They trust their family and friends rather than sales and advertisement. Social network marketing does work for some users who would like to share their opinion and contact with others. However, it not works for a group of people who want to be unique and don’t want follow others’ purchase pattern.

Marketers can place advs and create viral campaign on social networks to generate more users’ interest to their products. Compared with ads, viral campaign works more efficient for marketing purpose. According to Gupta, who is a professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, The advertising base model hasn’t succeeded on social networks. Users don’t like to click sites’ links to seek product information so the click through rate of ads is really low. Social Network Marketing: What Works? provide details about Gupta’s idea. It provides an example of viral campaign. On Valentine’s Day, Honda gave 750,000 a heart-shaped virtual gift with the Honda logo to Facebook users who can pass them to other friends on their contact lists. This type of virtual campaign has good impression to potential customers.

Therefore, marketers should not use those methods which not work on social networks in order to reach more social network users and generate more potiential customers.