Social Networking – Like having people in a box
Social networks are maturing. No longer are they the sole domain of college students providing details of last night’s youthful transgressions. Social networks have become sophisticated tools to interact and share information with a trusted network of friends and colleagues.
Social networks have become a mountain of captive consumers that are ripe to be marketed to. Take the Facebook phenomenon. According to Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, they currently have “passed 50 million users, doubling once every 6 months,” and this number includes “only active users who have used Facebook [in the] last 30 days.” He goes on to state that Facebook has “more than 25 million people [are] using Facebook every single day. Each person is viewing more than 40 pages a day, more than 65 billion page views a month.” That is a lot of exposure for a brand inside Facebook.
That data alone makes social networks an exciting marketing target, but we can sweeten the deal for you. It turns out that social networks are really good at connecting friends together. According to a recent social Internet survey conducted by Faves.com, 36% of Web users “highly trust” the information they receive from their online social network. What’s more is that this number jumps to 90% when we add those that “moderately trust” their social networks. Contrast this with only 4% of people having a high degree of trust in the content/opinions from vendors and advertisers in blogs or forums and you can see that it’s important to get these networks energized about your business. 2
Trusted networks are the easiest way to gain credibility with your marketing message. Social networks provide you an easy path into these trusted networks. The result is highly targeted and energized consumers visiting your site and purchasing your products.
This entry was posted on Thursday, January 3rd, 2008 at 12:26 pm and is filed under Social Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.