Social Media Marketing (1) - What is Social Media?

Social Media Marketing (1) - What is Social Media? - According to the ARD / ZDF online studies, three out of four Germans use the Internet, among 14 to 19 year olds even 100% (cf. ARD / ZDF online studies 2012).

But general internet usage has also changed: Terms such as tweeting, posting and liking have long since found their way into our everyday language. People meet in online social networks, exchange ideas and express themselves in this context about brands and products (cf. Haberling 2011, p. 1).

This communication environment is therefore predestined to function for marketing purposes.

In this blog series, the concept of social media should first be clarified in order to then provide the basics of a suitable marketing strategy on social media applications. Finally, the opportunities and risks of social media marketing are examined and given platforms are examined for their potential.

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These Are The Next Articles On "Social Media Marketing":

Principles of Social Media Marketing
Opportunities and risks in the social web
Social media platforms and their marketing potential

So What is Social Media?

The Internet itself has always been used as a social medium, but online social networks are now the primary many-to-many information channel.

Heymann-Reder defines the term social media as follows: »Social media are internet platforms on which users build relationships with other users and communicate, whereby communication is not limited to the exchange of verbal messages, but also includes many multimedia formats: photos, Videos, music and voice recordings and games. The user community of such a social media platform is called a community «(Heymann-Reder 2011, p. 20).

The term social media describes the exchange of information and communication between users on a platform.

Since the processing of information on the social web is designed by the user communities, the democratization of the internet increases as a result of the stronger weighting of the users' votes overall.

Every user is a communicator and recipient at the same time. In addition, knowledge - partly also internal - is generally accessible online. A still current example of this is the Wikileaks affair, which caused a lot of buzz in the media on this very point.

Social Media Marketing (1) - What is Social Media?

Classification of Social Media Applications

Social media applications are based on the simple principle of give and take (cf. Heymann-Reder 2011, p. 22). To date, a large number of social media applications have emerged.

Haberling tries to divide these into groups, with the focus of the categorization on the functions and the elementary social media elements of the applications. A distinction can be made between wikis, blogs, social sharing and social network services (cf. Haberling 2011, p. 13f):

Wikis

The information contained is read by the users as well as generated and edited themselves. Probably the best-known example among the wikis is Wikipedia.

Blogs

The term, made up of web and log, literally describes an online diary. Blogs are mostly operated by individuals and fed with their subjective opinion. Thanks to their transparency and openness, blogs enjoy a high level of trust from readers and customers.

If you network many blogs, a blogsphere is created. Twitter is an example of such networking.

Social Sharing

Applications of this type are intended for the exchange and delivery of digital content. There are significantly fewer content producers than passive consumers of the contributions. YouTube and Flickr are well-known representatives of social sharing applications.

Social Network Services

The most important characteristic of social networks is the communication between users. Each member generates their own content. The largest social network service in the world is Facebook.

Business Networks

Instead of personal relationships, professional contacts are maintained here. The German business portal Xing is one of these networks.

Consumer Portals, Rating Platforms

Here, users rate things like products and / or services and write reviews or limit themselves to reading them. Consumer trust is very high on consumer platforms. Amazon is an example of this category with its product reviews.

Question and Answer Portals

Consumers often seek help from an advisory community and answer questions from one another. Thus, mutual information is in the foreground. One example is gutefrage.net.

Bookmarking Services

Bookmarking is the process of collecting interesting and relevant links. The Pinterest page is probably the best known bookmarking service.

These social media applications form the basis for social media marketing, which in its form quite consciously focuses on these applications.

What's Next?

In the following articles you will learn how exactly you use the common structures and conditions for successful marketing, what the dangers of social media marketing are and also how mistakes can be avoided.

Do you know any other social media applications?

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