Week 5: Social Media & Social Change

FACEBOOK:

Facebook is the fastest growing social network in the world with over 100 million active members and continuing to grow every second!  Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.  Anyone can sign up for Facebook and interact with people they know in a very trusted environment.   In the first half of 2008, Facebook saw significant growth both nationally and globally.  As in the United States, It has become one of the largest and most successful Web sites in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and much throughout Europe.  It also shares ideas and approaches to help get one started when first beginning their tutorials.  Facebook is now available in 15 languages, including Spanish, French, and German and is continuing to grow and add functionality that is appealing to businesses and other work related sources of all kinds.  Facebook nationally recognized that engaging with businesses and buying things are part of the everyday life and with that in mind, it has created a well-drafted system were ads are more relevant and actually enhance, instead of interrupt, the user experience.  This type of market-friendly functionality, coupled with the fact that many customers and prospects are have Facebook and are constantly looking for new business.   

TWITTER:

It is often thought that in social media marketing environments it is easy, quick and cheap. The most difficult aspect of achieving success in social media marketing is dedicating your time and resources to your social media strategy.  This hard work and dedication behind the scenes is what makes success seems so easy.  Twitter is really changing the way businesses communicate. Many businesses have come to recognize its value, and marketing power. Twitter has become a phenomenon with 32 million users, including major companies such as Apple, JetBlue, and CNN. Twitter is a real-time medium and one that is still experiencing rapid growth. It is a powerful marketing tool and is a place to promote products, conduct research, build customer service relations and loyalty, and more-so to get ideas. The use of twitter for marketing purposes is constantly evolving where almost every week an individual can read about a unique application and or strategy for Twitter marketing. With the social media marketing, you will be able to promote your business in the best possible way, create an intact supporters as well as followers. If you are able to build followers and loyal visitors, there is higher chance of dragging your prospect buyers. Compelling words of advertisement and selling point must be established in every social media optimization. Placing your business name and product name all over the social media marketing collateral will definitely increase the chance of generating traffic  that eventually be converted into actual purchase and sales.

YOUTUBE:

YouTube has quickly become as ubiquitous in society as the cell phone. Named as one of the reasons Time Magazine named you as their Person of the Year, YouTube has become the go-to web destination for just about anything on video format, from movie trailers to clips of TV shows to home videos to puppy/kitten cams. Its video domain empire has grown to the point it’s the main resource for Comedy Central’s highest rated show, Tosh.0, a weekly show showcasing the funniest videos on the web with a running commentary by stand-up comedian, Daniel Tosh. So we’ve compiled some information on YouTube to illustrate to you just how wide and massive its operation is, exponentially more so after its acquisition by Google, for you to marvel at and better appreciate.  Some interesting facts regarding YouTube are: it profits over $2 billion per year, 3^rd most visited website ever created, U.S. contains 22% of all users worldwide, averages over 2 billion views per day, 10% of all internet traffic, 900 seconds is average time internet user spends on YouTube every day,  over 24 hours’ worth of video uploaded every minute.  These are many facts that contain to what has made YouTube such a powerful icon among many millions of users and how fast information can travel online that many people can see daily.  This is just one way of communication that allows someone to show the entire world their accomplishments.

These 3 sites are just few of the many that contain millions and millions of people that explore and share information among one another on a daily basis.  It's really crazy just to see how fast communication has grown of the past few years as we have become a society that requires so much of our time on getting information across as quickly as possible.  The following is a tutorial that shows just how fast our society is growing and counting on these rapids amounts of information: enjoy!

SOURCES:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOqRjNXxXBA
http://www.emergencymgmt.com/training/Harnessing-Social-Media-Connect-with-Communities.html
http://www.forbes.com/fdc/welcome_mjx.shtml