Social Media at Its Best

Social Media At Its Best

Social Media is any form of Internet communication where users can create online communities, share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (Social). Social media has been one of the fastest growing online segments with 86% of people ages 18-29 using some form of social media in 2011 (Henrikson). The popularity of social media websites is only more impressive when shown the raw facts behind it. More than 600 million people were registered Facebook users at the end of 2010, over 25 billion tweets were sent in 2010, and 2 billion videos are watched per day on Youtube (Royal). Since the creation of the Internet, businesses have used it as an outlet to advertise increasing customers and revenue, but with the creation and popularity of social media websites, the ways companies advertise online changed. Businesses could no longer simply post an ad on a website and wait, they had to be more involved, creating a whole new challenge to advertising via social media website.

By the end of 2011, approximately 31 billion dollars will have been spent for online advertising (Chmielewski), with social media websites claiming 11% of that (Indvik). This statistic alone shows just how important businesses believe it is to advertise on social websites, however for a business to be successful with a social media advertising campaign today, it takes much more than just money. Companies online must be engaged, informative, available, and interesting to increase customer interest as well as profits. The way companies advertise can vary from Website to Website, creating a bigger challenge on how businesses approach marketing campaigns.

With the creation of Facebook, companies were given the ability to create a free company page with information about their business instantly viewable to over 800 million users in 2011 (Statistics), and not only could they create free company profiles, businesses had the opportunity to pay for advertising...