Social networking has been around much longer than the internet as people are social creatures and have always been forming groups and being collective with each other!

But, since the explosion of the internet era, with billions of people being connected to the world wide web, we are now able to communicate or socially network in a way that was previously impossible!

The social-networking trend is causing a major shift in how internet is designed and used, people are now using the internet as a tool for connecting people, making evolution in human social interaction (Weaver & Morrison, 2008).

The notion of ‘six degrees of separation’ by Milgram (1967) has been an important study in understanding how close we all really are to one another. It shows that any two strangers on average are distanced by 6.6 degrees of separation. In social networking sites, this means that we can potentially extend our social network to the whole world with less degrees of separation than we imagine.

If you really want to understand how close we all really are, this video gives you a great idea! It’s fascinating!

Six degrees of separation also implies that weak ties encourage strong ties and actually better in sharing information and enhancing social activities (Levin & Cross, 2004). Also, by understanding these weak-ties, marketers can begin to achieve brand monitoring and watch network trends (Li & Bernoff, 2008).

Due to this explosion of social networking and the use of social media, many businesses have a major opportunity to benefit from this. The core social platforms in most countries according to Weinberg (2010) are, Facebook for consumer audiences, Linkedin for business purposes and Twitter, Google+ for both (cited in Chaffey & Ellis-Chadwick 2013).

These platforms create an online community amongst people and offer an online presence for a company (Chaffey & Ellis-Chadwick, 2013) proving vital in today’s society and companies can’t afford to be left behind!

Examples of how companies can use social media in a beneficial way:

• Facebook: popular with most companies. Facebook pages are designed to help businesses engage an audience and promote their services/products. People are encouraged to ‘like’ the page, then members are referred to as ‘fans’. Fans can then receive status update information from the business page directly on their newsfeeds.

Paid Facebook ads is also another option that can be used to recruit new fans, but companies should bare in mind that this isn’t completely essential as fans will be attracted as other fans like and share information; so having a fun/active page is entirely encouraged for businesses (Chaffey & Ellis-Chadwick, 2013).

• Twitter: twitter enables companies to create their own page with communication made through messages that contain up to 140 characters. Companies can create a short bio for themselves, the same concept for regular users as well. Similar to Facebook statuses, companies can tweet messages to communicate to its ‘followers’ and also add links to company websites which can contain relevant offers to engage their audience.

Twitter is also commonly used for customer service, if a person has a problem with a product, a person can tweet directly to the company or a company’s separate support account and interact with the person to solve the solution (Chaffey & Ellis-Chadwick, 2013). This link shows great examples of companies interacting right.

Opinions are constantly being shared on the internet of a variety of topics and issues; people are expressing their true opinions on a wide variety of topics on twitter and similar services (Mehta et al, 2012). Information can bias public opinion so from this information we can see how these types of social media platforms can be crucial for businesses to participate in and use to their advantage, creating a closeness or relationship with customers.

This cost effective way to advertise and create brand awareness sounds easy enough to implement right? It is… That’s what creates the danger. Companies have to be diligent when using social media. This article highlights a key example of a social media fail from the simple hashtag #RonaldMcDonald and the ways in which preventing .

Return On Investment (ROI) – a way of measuring the success of your social media campaign – is an important factor when negative eWOM is hitting your social media campaign. As monitoring what is proving valuable for your business’s objectives and recognising gaps is the difference between a good social media campaign and a to-be disastrous one (Hoffman & Fodor, 2010).

This video shows how company: Brandwatch uses social media monitoring tools in order to measure ROI, by looking at conversation that’s happening in real time (in terms of what’s been posted publicly, privacy is upheld, don’t worry!) and even finding negative conversation that’s stirring up.

Key take away here – always monitor closely the eWOM being generated by your social media campaign, we are all connected!

Reference:

Chaffey, D. & Ellis-Chadwick, F. (2012). Digital marketing: strategy, implementation and practice. 5th edn. Pearson Education. Harlow.

Hoffman, D. & Fodor, M. (2010). ‘Can You Measure the ROI of Your Social Media Marketing?’. Mit Sloan Management Review. Vol. 52. no. 1. pp. 41-41.

Levin, D.Z. & Cross, R. (2004). ‘The Strength of Weak Ties You Can Trust: the Mediating Role of Trust in Effective Knowledge Transfer’. Management Science. Vol. 50 No. 11. pp. 1477-90.

Milgram, S. (1967). ‘The small world problem’. Psychology Today. Vol. 2. pp. 60-7.

Mehta. R, Mehta. D, Chheda. D, Shah. C & Chawan, M.P. (2012). ‘Sentiment Analysis and Influence Tracking using Twitter’. International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer Science and Electronics Engineering, Vol. 1. No. 2. pp. 73-79.

Bernoff, J. & Li, C. (2008). ‘Harnessing the Power of the Oh-So-Social Web’. MIT Sloan Management Review. Vol. 49. No. 3. pp. 36-36.

Shu Yu-Hao Chuang. (2011) ‘The Perceived Benefits of Six‐Degreed‐Separation Social Networks’, Internet Research, 21(1), pp. 26–45.

Weaver, A.C. & Morrison, B.B. (2008). ‘Social Networking’. Computer, Vol. 41, No. 2, pp. 97-100.