Overall, social media offers significant advantages for businesses that adequately monitor, respond, amplify, and lead consumer behavior. The most powerful social-media strategies focus on a limited number of marketing responses closely related to every stage along the consumer decision journey. As we’ve described, social media has myriad uses, and everyone seems to be on a platform for a different reason. It can be difficult for businesses to keep up with platforms’ functionalities and demographics. In addition to this core demographic, a wide variety of people of all ages are on social media, and certain generations gravitate toward different platforms.
Niche networks
But what would you say if your great-grandmother asked you to define social media? Our definition—the applications and websites that allow people to interact with other users, businesses, communities, and content—is accurate, but it also seems to include a large portion of the internet. And how can businesses use social media to reach new customers in new ways? Social networks provide limitless opportunities to connect with others who have cultural, political, religious, and other interests similar to your own. The Internet provides tools for cultivating, managing, and capitalizing on those networks, allowing you to form an initial relationship with someone you’ve never met in person, who not only enhances but could, in fact, change the direction of your life.
- House of Representatives passed a bill requiring the Chinese-owned social network platform TikTok to divest from its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, or face a ban in the United States.
- These networks often act as a customer relationship management tool for companies selling products and services.
- By leveraging social networking platforms, businesses of any size can reach a larger audience and build relationships with their target market, new customers and loyal fans.
- Although often used interchangeably, social network is different than social media.
- It was started in 1997 and was soon followed by Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook.
In the late 1970s, early forms of social networking emerged with the advent of bulletin board systems (BBS). These systems allowed users to connect and interact with each other by posting messages on a shared platform. While primitive by today’s standards, BBS laid the groundwork for online communities and paved the way for the social networking sites we know today. The term “social network” refers both to a person’s connections to other people in the real world and to a platform that supports online communication, such as Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter.
Social Networks Explained
Businesses use social networking to build a brand, sell products, grow a customer base, and strengthen customer relationships and service. Social networking and social media are often used synonymously, but there is a distinction. But social networking goes beyond that by allowing users to interact with one another.
Social networking guidelines (to stay safe online)
There are niche social networks that focus on a specific theme or style of posting. Tagging is another common element of social networking sites, particularly Facebook and Instagram. If you post a photo of several people, you can identify another person in the photo by tagging them, usually by clicking on the picture and adding their name. Some social networking sites have a “group” element that helps users find people with similar interests or engage in discussions on certain topics.
Cyberbullying is when someone makes social media posts with the intention to harm someone else. This can take the form what is social networking of publicly posting the private information of someone or sending abusive messages. Tragically, cyberbullying has led to the suicide of some individuals. Doxing is when someone publicly posts the personally identifiable information, such as an address or phone number, of someone else. It is crucial for users to be mindful and proactive in mitigating these challenges and risks.
In most cases, they may remain anonymous, but by providing some background information they can make it easier to connect with other people who share their interests or have similar backgrounds. Once someone has created their account and profile, they can view the profiles of other users and connect to them (often using the terms “friend” or “contact”). Other features common to social networks include private messaging between people, sharing content (like images, links, and text-based posts) with their friends, and posting comments on the content shared by others. Companies have begun to merge business technologies and solutions, such as cloud computing, with social networking concepts. Instead of connecting individuals based on social interest, companies are developing interactive communities that connect individuals based on shared business needs or experiences. Many provide specialized networking tools and applications that can be accessed via their websites, such as LinkedIn.