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Table ofContents

Abstract………………………………………………………………….…………………………………….2
History of the Internet and Social Media………………………………….…………………………….…….2
How People interact with advertisement on Social Media………...…………………….……………………4
What is a Business Model…………………………….……………………………………………………….4
Promotion through Facebook as a New Business Model……..………………..................……………..…….5
Promotion through Twitter as a new business model ….................................................................................6
Promotion through YouTube as a New Business Model………......................................….………………..14
Pros And Cons of Using Social Media as A form Of Promotion……...………………………….…………11
Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………..………..12
References………………………………………………………………………………….………………...13
Abstract
This report examines promotion through social media as a new business model. The history of social media and the internet will be broken. Inquiring of where, when and why social media was created along with how social media grew its gigantic stature of today will be answered. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube will be studied under the heading of, Supporting Customers, Differentiating Products, Reaching Customers, Selling and Marketing Promotion. Additionally, case studies and research on academic papers being highlighted periodically in sub-sections of the report.
History of the Internet and Social Media
In this section of this report we are going to be looking at the history of the internet, the history of social media, while also looking at where when and why social media was created and how it grew to the size it is today.
First must look back to 1971 when we see the first email being sent from computer to computer which was revolutionary at the time. The message that was sent consisted of “QWERTYUIOP”.
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It has to be noted that the growth of something so simple has amassed to the size it is today is quiet amazing, with the number of email’s being sent every day estimated to be around 294 billion in April 2010 - and it is said to still be rising to this day.
The growth of something that began as a simple method of communication for a specific user group to what it is today, estimated in April 2010 at 294 billion emails and rising [Tschabitscher]. We can then move on to
1991where we see the World Wide Web being first open to the public. Only being able to be accessed by a select few as PC’s were not a household item at the time it was a small percentage of the population who had access to an internet connection and a computer that they could use this new wonder. Only 3 years later in 1994 we see the world’s first blog being put online by a person named Justin Hall, “Justin’s Blog” was the name of this blog. Despite having a relatively small number of users in comparison to what we have now the internet was still picking up speed. If we look at the time period between 2005 and 2010 we see the number of users on the web doubled surpassing 2 billion, it is still rising even now as some parts of the world are only now starting to get access to the internet and to computers in general e.g. Third worlds countries. So there is still huge potential for the internet to rise to even bigger numbers than it already has which are still extremely huge at the current moment in time.
If we then move on to how social media was created and also how its numbers grew to the increase in numbers of uses having access to the internet we see a trend of how much people thrive of social interaction on the internet. The first social media site according to sources was Friends Reunited a British social media site created in 1999 the social media site was created as a way of helping old class mates ‘reunite’ with each other as it is very easy to loss contact with old class mates from years ago and it is a cool idea to be able to connect with them over the internet to catch up and see what they are doing differently now from years in the future and this was the first real use of the internet as a social sphere. Moving on to 3 years later, we see
Friendster a social media site opened in to the public of the U.S. in 2002 it had grown a user base of 3million users in 3 months. And when something becomes this popular others try to mimic this to try and achieve the same success it had, so the next year we see a clone very similar to Friendster, Myspace which was launched in order to take the place of Friendster in the social network sphere. But with the increasing user base and size comes extra competition for top stop. If we then use Facebook for our next example which started out as a simple college project and was tested on American high school students to see how they interacted with it, but due to its immense popularity it was opened to the public with an age limit of 13 in 2005 and the membership was still expanding rapidly. Also alongside with this we see the creation YouTube and Twitter coming into creation around the same time as Facebook. The first YouTube video ever being uploaded on the 23 April 2005 from a user named jawed who uploaded a video of himself at the zoo showing us elephants in the background, and this was the start of YouTube storing and retrieving videos from the public as a free video sharing platform. We also see Twitter a micro blogging site allowing users to update their
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‘Followers’ with small blog posts consisting of 140 characters or less. As we can see 2005 was the golden year for social media rise as we have 3 of the main players in today’s market being launched at roughly the same time. In 2009 we see Facebook taking the top spot as the most used social media site passing out
Myspace with 200million nationwide users to the site doubling the numbers of Myspace. Facebook now have a huge lead over other social media sites having 483 million active daily users, if we compare this to twitter we see 100million active daily users and YouTube having 1 Billion unique users to the site every month. AS we can see these numbers are crazy and to have gained an audience this big in a short few years is an incredible result and is still expanding today.
How People interact with advertisement on Social Media
In recent years there has been much speculation in relation to how companies such as Google are using your personal information in conjunction with social media sites such as Facebook and YouTube. Many people worry about how Google are using the personal details that they post on Facebook as well as their internet browsing patterns to gather information about the person that can be sold on to advertisers. There is a consensus between some users of Facebook that "free services treat users worse" which is highlighted by the quote "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product." However this is not necessarily the case as
"there are plenty of companies whose services you pay for who treat their users atrociously."
Possibly the biggest dispute regarding people privacy in relation to advertising on social media sites were with Facebook. In 2007 Facebook launched their "Beacon Advertisement system" where they would collect information from other sites and advertise them on Facebook but due to protest it was then shut down in
2009.
Business model
A business model is a plan implemented by a business to generate profit from their operation (Investopedia
2012). A sustainable business model is essential for every business to survive. It must be flexible to allow for change. The digital world, especially, is accelerating at an unimaginable pace. This report examines breaks down a business model into its core segments, Supporting Customers, Differentiating Products,
Reaching Customers, Selling and Marketing Promotion from which Facebook, Twitter and YouTube will each be in turn studied under each heading.
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Promotion through Facebook as a new business model
As stated previously Facebook was created in 2005 and has since created a massive following and is one of the biggest social media sites on the internet to date. Facebook offers many services which can help generate revenue and brand awareness for a new business model in today’s market. We are going to be looking at the ways in which Facebook fits into what makes promotion good promotion and exploring the options a business has while using these categories.
Differencing Your Product : Differencing your product on Facebook can be achieved in many different ways, one of the most influential ways is to create positive press around your brand/specific product. This will create a brand that your customers will grow to trust and you will earn their respect and in turn their cash money! This can be done by responding quickly to your customers, by doing giveaways frequently on the site or page and by keeping your fans up to date with what’s going on and actually listening to their advice as it will build great brand customer relation and make them think of the business as more of a long lost friend rather than a company.
Reaching Customers : Reaching our customers with a product on Facebook can be quiet a hard task as there are so many other business showing off their products and marketing there stuff on a daily basis. But if done properly it can hold great opportunities for a business. As Facebook does have a massive daily active user base and this can show highly with sales if done effectively, one of the main advantages of Facebook to help with this is he related Like Pages section where it brings up recommend pages that you could like, from what you have liked previously e.g. If you like a page of a certain clothes company for example Nike it would from your liking this page bring you other pages who do similar stuff to them such as Adidas etc. So this is a great help as you would show up alongside other business/pages that do similar posts and or product selling which can be great for reaching customers who are already interested in a product you are selling.
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Pricing &Selling : Pricing and selling your product can be achieved really easily now-a-days as Facebook offers an inbuilt transition service through the site itself if we use Lady GaGa’s fan page for example we can see that she gets some sales through the inbuilt store in the site, making the traffic brought to her page even more helpful to her growth as it is made even simpler for fans and consumers to buy her music as they do not need to go create other account’s elsewhere or mess with other third party companies as it is from the
Facebook page itself.
Supporting Customers : For supporting customers is one of the best sites to achieve this as you can respond to customers that have issues instantly and can stop problems from blowing up and causing more of a problem for the company e.g. The mobile network 48 when it crashed earlier in the year, many people posted to their Facebook page asking what was wrong why was it down etc. And they responded immediately to the customers and sent out posts explaining what was happening to the signal and keeping the customers updated, which by doing this they saved themselves from losing a lot of customers as they kept it under control.
Promotion : Facebook is great in terms of promotion as it offers so many ways and plans to sell your business and put it out further into the sphere of its media. One of the ways in which Facebook is a good choice for this is by buying likes it is also very cheap for 1 dollar you can buy 20-25 like but this will boost traffic as it will show higher in results and is very easy to buy like as it can be found openly on forums and other trading sites. Another way in which Facebook is great for promotion is
Twitter Through Promotion as a New Business Model
Introduction
The varying use and value of social media is extensively broad, ranging from marketing strategy to sending and receiving images - with lots in between. Twitter has a whole follows this trend. Many of Twitters users’ adopt twitter as their daily primary news source. The question of credibility is prevalent when reading a
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tweet containing news. “Tweeting is believing? Understanding Microblog Credibility Perceptions” (Morris,
Counts, Roseway 2012) an academic published papers examines the perception of credibly a tweet has is dependent on several factors. This sub-section will state several of these causes provided through research from said academic paper and explain why these causes have impact on credibility.
“We show that users are poor judges of trustfulness based on content alone, and instead are influenced by user names when performing a credibility assignment” (Morris, Counts, Roseway 2012). It is difficult to trust a singular piece of information without having knowledge of where the information has been derived from. Main stream media such as, television, radio, do not have this difficulty - as it is accepted that they uphold a certain level of professionalism and journalistic integrity when delivering news pieces to the public.
User images have a significant impact rating on user’s perception of credibility. (Morris, Counts, Roseway
2012). A professional photo resonates positively with the audience bringing a level of credibility and trust to their tweets. It was found that users with cartoon images, such as anime characters, lose some credibility among users instantly. “Looking like a stalker” (Morris, Counts, Roseway 2012) reduces the likely hood that any tweet has of being taken serious. In the majority of cases, a respectable profile image is essentially for a user’s who desires his tweets to be taken with any credibility.
Observing the bio of a tweeters user greatly enhanced the credibility perception of that user. Clicking URLs or clicking user names in order to view an author’s twitter homepage when prompted, users noted their value
(Morris, Counts, Roseway 2012). Having a website linked in a twitter bio had two strong effects. If the website linked was of poor design it carried a negative rating on a users perception. Although a welldesigned website had a strong impact on users perception of the twittered at hand. This shows the great importance of having a website such as, a blog, about me or personal or business domain linked to a Twitter bio. Of even greater importance is the design of said websites, in cases such as bogs it is useful to show some form of regular post updates.
Tweet topic
“Respondents were least concerned with credibility for celebrity news and gossip related tweets and secondary for movie and restaurant reviews. News, political, emergencies and consumer oriented tweets because the greatest concern about credibility”. This is a real finding due to the statistics presently, 81 percent (Cheng, Evans 2009) of people on twitter are between the ages of 15 -35. General consensus would believe that young people have little interest in the news. A relation to how the news is traditionally conveyed and communicated in traditionally media compared with how social media conveys the news, from these statistics the latter undoubtedly is more appealing to young people.
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(Morris, Counts, Roseway 2012)
Topic related user names were associated with credible information. Additionally survey participants expressed concerns about tweets containing non standard grammar such as abbreviations commonly used in
IM and other digital age modification to language (Morris, Counts, Roseway 2012). A topic related user name brings credibility to a tweet. InteractiveBill is a twitter handle which automatically gives credibility to his tweets from his user name alone. This is a strong example of how a user can enhance his social media presence from his username.
A knowledge of social media can bring great benefits to those who seek it. Online credibility is not a
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ambiguous area, credibility can be sought and obtained through: a respectful profile image, having a website or blog linked to your twitter bio, a topically username, restraining from modern age slang and abbreviations’ when writing tweets. Twitter is an modern age news source, among it’s many other uses.
There is spam, false reports and rumours on twitter. This should not deter anyone from using twitter as a news medium. With a subtle amount of care and attention while also following verified users, Twitter is a legitimate new age information sharing power house.
Valuing the content of a tweet
As said previously, a tweet can contain up to 140 character. The message within these characters can vary stupendously between Twitter users and specific tweets in question. It is rarely asked however, which type of tweets do users (twitter users) favour and which type of tweets to users have a distaste for.
An intriguing academic article entitled. ‘Who gives a Tweet? Evaluating Microblog content value’
(Andre, Bernstein, Luther 2012), provides accurate answers to these question within a specific user base.
The researchers gathered their data through a website asking the public to rate a selection of tweets. The website went viral through technology media giants such as Techgrunch and Mashable. Naturally this lead to the data being submitted to be skewed towards technology people, through conventional wisdom it be claimed that IT people on average are information hungry; leading them to favour tweets that are information rich. The results of this paper cannot be entirely accurate for the general public at hand.
“Followers described 36% of the rated tweets as worth reading , 25 % were not worth reading, 39% decided as neutral
(Andre, Bernstein, Luther 2012). Users choose to follow these accounts it is astonishing that very little of the tweets are actually liked. It can be seen that when choosing to follow a Twitter users the quality of their tweets may not be the sole reason for following them. Occupation, relationship, and follow me back are all additionally reasons to follow a Twitter user.
The three most strongly disliked categories were Presences Maintenance, Conversation, and Me Now. I now am a tweet relating to a user’s current status, these often include images and text of current location and feelings. “Presence maintenance tweets eg. HulloTwitter”(Andre, Bernstein, Luther 2012) are found to boring to read. The most enjoyed tweets which users enjoyed were “Questions to Followers, Information
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sharing and Self Promotion” (Andre, Bernstein, Luther 2012). These tweets are interesting, thought provoking and knowledgeable for followers. It most not is forgotten, as mentioned in the paper, that there may be a bias present due to the sample size of volunteers.
“Not worthreading: being boring, repeating old news, crytic, or using to many hash tags and @ symbols“
(Andre, Bernstein, Luther 2012). Old news being published on twitter is a waste of a user’s time, which naturally received negative feedback. Cryptic tweets are tweets which have content no real meaning or requires further information for full understanding. The over use of hash tags and @ symbols deters from the message being conveyed, a tweet can become more difficult to read and generally increase the irritation level of the reader.
(Garber 2012)
Overuse of hash tag and capital letters.
Users primarily valued twitter as an information medium. Tweets worth reading were often information 48% or funny 24%. (Andre, Bernstein, Luther 2012)
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(Andre, Bernstein, Luther 2012)
Humour is a highly value characteristic of a tweet as shown in the above illustration, second only to informative tweets. Boring tweets cause of most animosity among
Twitters value through promotion as a business model
This report will examine social media as a new business model; the social media being investigated is twitter. This report will explain what twitter is, how it is used from both a consumer point of view and a business one, compare how twitter compares to a typical business model under the headings of: reaching customers, differentiating products, pricing, selling, supporting customers and achieving customer satisfaction, then marketing and promoting through twitter as a new business model, the pros and cons of using twitter as a business model then finishing with a conclusion from the facts and information found.
Twitter is an online social networking and micro blogging services the enables the user to send and read tweets (Wikipedia 2012) A twitter consumer uses twitter as to post messages of any distinction to a fellow followers or a status to the twitter universe. They can read their news feed (a stream of information from the user’s followers containing 140 character tweets) which is often used as a substitute to traditional news sources. Tweets commonly contain a hash tag; hash tags provide a way for people to search for tweets on a common topic.
In relation to businesses, twitter is big business. The total number of registered twitter users is 555,750,000 with the average number of tweets a day being 58 million and the number of search engine queries per day being 2.1 billion (Statisticbrain 2012).
These staggering numbers force businesses to start using twitter to promote their brand, products, servicing, converse with customers, monitor feedback and trends and provide customer service or they are leaving themselves at risk to falling behind to rival businesses with their out dated business model.
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Reaching customers
Social media makes reaching a global audience easier than it has ever been. As previously seen the number of people using twitter on a daily basis is gargantuan. Even as globalised the world has come with access to the internet in most parts of the globe, social media has a gamut range but with business in contention with one another the challenge to reach the maximum population become more difficult .Meeting the challenge of reaching customers on Twitter can be the defining point between a successful business. To ensure you are reaching the maximum possible customers business must have a good strategy in place and a strong foundation in how social media operates.
An example of a good strategy may be; Get customers attention, reach audience, get them to like you, get them to interact. Business can't sell to someone who has never heard of them, this means garnering attention online is a must. Get them to you like, or in Twitter's case: get customers to follow you (Techcrunch
2012).Twitter has a build in functionality for popular content to trend using the hash tag which allows people to interact on a common topic. Businesses can take advantage of this tool to reach a wider audience.
SingTel a giant telecommunication company wanted to raise awareness of new 4G services launch to reach new and existing customers. The company took to Twitter to attempt to achieve this goal. In their efforts they partnered with a popular figure on Twitter, HossanLeong, to reach new customers and to get customers to be interested there in business and their promotion. SingTel purchased Promoted Trends (users use promoted trend the same way as other Trending topics – the only real difference is promoted trends are clearly labelled as such) along with promoted tweets to reach the wider audience. Affiliating with celebrities, promoted trends and tweets the promotion campaign for SingTel was a massive success with 18% engagement rate through promoted trends, 17x increase in daily mentions of the companies Twitter page and a whopping 39% increase in traffic to SingTel's 4G website. (Twitter for Business, 2013).
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Differentiating your product and services
Differentiating a business’s products and services requires a thorough understanding of how to effectively advertise, communicate and have a grasp on what the competition is doing to separate themselves from the pack. The power of reaching customers through promoted trends and tweets is undoubtedly a powerful tool but these tools have little effect on differentiating your products and services unless there is something that sets your advertisements apart from the rest, personality. While persuasive messages are often targeted toward specific demographic groups, we wanted to see whether their effectiveness could be improved by targeting personality characteristics that cut across demographic categories,” (Psychologicalscience.org,
2012). A business which has turned its business model on its head is Old Spice. Old Spice once catered to a demographic of men equal to or older than 30 years of age. They have reinvented how to promote their products through witty Tweets, images and videos. Fully incorporating promotion through social media as a new business model to change their demographic from 30 years of age and up to 18 years of age and older while stimulating sales.Old Spice utilized the power of promotion through social media as a new business model to turn a stagnating business around to a top competitor in their field.
Supporting customers
Increasingly consumers are using social media for customer support, customers not just want to fill out a form online or wait to speak to a telephone referrer. Many businesses utilise twitter to support their customers, they can deal with defects and returns, answer products and services related questions, provide suggestions and feedback.
The global IT giant Dell has countless social media account dedicated to supporting their customers. These dedicated accounts from @Dell include @Dell Security, @Dell Cares, @Dell Services, @Dell Cares PRO,
@Dell Education and @Dell Sales Training to name but a few. While @JetBlue airlines offer Twitter-based customer service, they call it their “online info booth”. This twitter account is a subsidiary to their full customer services team; they a link to their full customer service team for issues that require immediate response. This is quite a nice balance Jet Blue has found between supporting customers without having to incur the financial woes of having two full customer supports.
Achieving customer satisfaction
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The ultimate success or failure of a business depends on how much it helps customers achieve their objectives. Happy customers will become the best sales people and buy more from the business. Unhappy customers will become your biggest liability ( Techcrunch 2012).Twitter as a new business model helps monumentally to achieve customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction is achieved through basic human interaction, social media as a whole makes interacting with customers easier, more efficient and faster than ever before. When a customer voices concerns to a business over twitter, the business can reply immediatelygiven that they have the necessary infrastructure in place.
Marketing and promotion
Promotion is a term frequently used in marketing. There are three basic objectives of promotions: to increase demand, launching and promoting new products, sales, strengthening brand present information to a customer (Wikipedia Marketing Promotion 2013). This category will examine each of these in turn to present how social media add to an existing business model in turn forming a new business model.
Participatory promotions are particularly important for launching new products as they add excitement to online purchasing and an incentive for customers to tell their friends (Saravanakumar and Suganthalakshmi,
2012). When a business is promoting on Twitter their hopes are that a promotion will go viral. Content going viral means mean people are sharing your content online through liking, posting, watching, discussing and retweeting. The achievement for viral content for the perspective of a business is that there are more eyes on the businesses content.
What is Youtube and How it Fits into Being Good For Promotion
What is YouTube and how it fits into Being Good for Promotion
YouTube was launched in 2005 and is currently the largest video sharing website in the world and the third most visited website overall. The site grew rapidly in its first year and was purchased by google in 2006.
YouTube allows users to upload videos and share them with friends or broadcast them publicly to a larger audience. Viewers can "comment" on a video and there tends to be high interaction between the video
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uploader and their audience. Viewers may also choose to “subscribe" to a channel which means that they receive updates on new videos uploaded and recent activity of a channel which can help a business to gain a fan base or following. This is why many businesses may choose to promote their brand through the medium of YouTube videos.
Rival websites to YouTube that also allow for video uploading and sharing include: vimeo, daily motion and blinkx but with YouTube receiving over 1 billion unique users a month, businesses tend to use YouTube as their number one video outlet in order to receive the most views.
YouTube allows businesses to convey their messages in a more sensual way than just text, through video and audio. Businesses can make an ad campaign but no longer need to pay for a time slot on television as
YouTube is an effective outlet for their ads. Several small businesses have received success through
YouTube after their videos went viral however large global businesses have also embraced marketing through viral video campaigns.
Selling
"Dollar shave club” is a business that began in July 2011 and later re-launched in March 2012 after posting a witty advertisement video on YouTube that emphasized the simplicity and low price of their service. The video cost only $4,500 to produce (a small fraction of the cost of a television advertisement) and it boosted sales and helped massively to increase brand recognition.
In order to promote rail safety, Metro Trains in Melbourne, Australia created a public service announcement campaign titled: "Dumb Ways to Die". The campaign proved to be extremely popular and went viral as it appeared in newspapers and on radio but it got the majority of its exposure through an animated YouTube video. The ad's success not only increased awareness of safety, resulting in a decrease in "near-miss" accidents but it also estimated that "within two weeks it had generated at least $50 million worth of global media value in addition to more than 700 media stories, for "a fraction of the cost of one TV ad".
Reaching Customers
An example of a business who managed to boost sales by changing its market demographic was the brand of body wash "Old Spice" with the campaign: "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like". The video ad was broadcast on television as well as on YouTube but the emphasis that the business exerted on promoting their
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product through social media caused a 107 percent increase in sales and more widespread brand recognition.
The ad not only grew Old Spice's following on YouTube but it also created thousands of discussions about the brand between users on other sites such as Facebook and twitter. On the 13th of July 2010 there were
61,629 tweets related to Old Spice and on the 14th of July there were 96,364 tweets related to Old Spice which was a massive increase on previous days where related tweets ranged between 1,500 and 2,500.
Pricing
YouTube remains as the most popular video hosting site and many businesses chose to upload their videos to their YouTube channel as opposed to uploading them on their own personal website as they have the option to embed YouTube videos onto their websites and all views from external sources will accumulate to the same video.
YouTube is an outlet for businesses to spread their videos in order to gain recognition but businesses can also opt to "monetize" their videos meaning that they can use their videos to earn revenue as well as for promotion purposes. Not only can businesses allow ads on their videos to earn revenue but they can also pay to have their ads placed on other peoples videos.
Most people who use YouTube to promote their business already have their business established before they begin to upload YouTube videos however there is also a minority of people who begin making YouTube videos as a hobby and later develop it into a business. They do this by using their popularity to sell merchandise and even develop a brand.
Despite the increasing use of social media such as YouTube, for business promotion, large businesses still invest heavily in traditional forms of media in order to keep their brand recognized.
Some businesses have established a hybrid form of promotion by using social media in conjunction with traditional forms of media such as television, radio, newspaper advertisements and billboards.
With traditional media, businesses must be concise with the size and duration of their advertisements as cost usually increases when the output of ads increase but because YouTube is free to use, businesses can create videos that contains additional information that their target market wouldn't usually see. The world renowned brand Coca-Cola has over 2,000 videos which gives their audience an extra insight into the company.
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Supporting Customers
The increased use of social media and particularly YouTube is largely down to the fact that businesses can update their customers in seconds of new offers or products that have been released as opposed to newspapers for example where businesses rely on people stumbling across their advertisement.
Advantages of YouTube for businesses
Demonstrating products
YouTube allows businesses to show their products in action which can convince potential customers to buy the product. "This is particularly useful for companies with limited physical distribution channels, including those who mostly sell over the internet"
Customer Interaction
The comment section on YouTube videos allows customers to interact with the video publisher by giving feedback on the video, there is also an option to either "like" or "dislike the video. This can be helpful for businesses especially if they upload a pilot video for a new campaign they are planning on launching. If the response is negative they may abandon the campaign in order to maintain their reputation.
Google search results
YouTube videos rank high in google search results so it is very common that there are videos on the first page of results related to the topic that has been searched. This may give an advantage to businesses that choose to upload videos to YouTube if their rival businesses do not have any YouTube videos as search engine results are considered to be one of the key factors of an online business' success.
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Disadvantage: Requires constant updating
"Typically in Google searches, the more aged the blog post is, the more it gets brought up to the top results page. This is because the page has incurred more backlinks and has increased credibility rate online. In comparison, YouTube searches don’t act that way. Rather, it considers the newest videos as the top-rated hits." (Conner) This can cause businesses' costs to rise if they have to continually produce more videos in order to remain fresh. One viral video can give a business a great start but if there are no follow up posts the audience that they gained may disappear.
Negative response to companies such as YouTube selling peoples information to advertisers.
In recent years there has been much speculation in relation to how companies such as Google are using your personal information in conjunction with social media sites such as Facebook and YouTube. Many people worry about how Google are using the personal details that they post on Facebook as well as their internet browsing patterns to gather information about the person that can be sold on to advertisers. There is a consensus between some users of Facebook that "free services treat users worse" which is highlighted by the quote "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product." (Masnick) However this is not necessarily the case as "there are plenty of companies whose services you pay for who treat their users atrociously."
(Masnick)
YouTube for example use your browsing history to determine what advertisements will show up on the next video that you watch. Seeing ads that may or may not interest you seems like a small price to pay for using the services of YouTube but what people find to be the biggest turn off from YouTube is that they are selling your interests and preferences to advertisers. This can be seen as a negative for customers but it can also help to grow businesses that use google ads on YouTube by reaching their exact target market.
Possibly the biggest dispute regarding people privacy in relation to advertising on social media sites were with Facebook. In 2007 Facebook launched their "Beacon Advertisement system" where they would collect information from other sites and advertise them on Facebook but due to protest it was then shut down in
2009.
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Conclusion
From the research we have done we can come to the conclusion that social media is a sustainable form of promotion as it offers many services that can help a business grow and expand while also gaining fans as well as business partners through the social sphere of online communities. While also being able to boosts sales as well as brand awareness and having people to know, love and trust the brand from the comfort of their social network shows it has a right to be called a good form of promotion. Also it still has room to expand even further and from growth scales, it doesn’t look like it’s going to stop any time soon. So yes
Social media is a good promotion method as regards a new business model.
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References
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