Social Networks for Viral Marketing

I bet you heard people talking about the craze of web-based games like Farmville, Mafia Wars, Café World, etc. If you don’t have Facebook account, you might not know about it and you’re not “in.” The trend today among young generations and even not, is getting their life exposed online via these social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Friendster, Multiply, etc. and enjoying the online applications. Well, this online tool primarily allows you to find and connect with family, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances via the vast World Wide Web.

Image Credit: Flickr

Seeing this strong evolution of the new age social network is just overwhelming; individual online social network is getting bigger and deeper. Taking this into consideration, here’s a great opportunity to connect with potential customers (and even existing ones) by business owners. It’s a huge network and great business opportunity is around at a low cost, with instant varied demographics of your choice, and less time to reach a great population.

And here comes an ideal venue for viral marketing for businesses using online social networks. It’s actually a social network mining (a sub-field of Social Network Analysis in Data Mining) which basically evaluates and discovers how individuals can influence the buying behavior of others. This means that using social networks for viral marketing online simply tries to influence others under his/her network to purchase or try a certain product or service an individual recently tried. It’s something like empowering the positive word-of-mouth (traditional) marketing method which is still effective. That is why utilizing online social networks is a great venue for this.

For example, recently I saw someone became a fan of the “Cebu Pacific Air Fare Promos” page on Facebook promoting its discounted tickets. Then suddenly, I saw on my Facebook wall that a lot of people were also subscribing to that page. It’s effective! Now, many people are updated to the air fare promos of that airline and promo tickets sell like hotcakes. Sometimes I can’t even access their website to check for available tickets, perhaps due to heavy web traffic.

Last Tuesday, I attended the VIRAL IDEAS Webinar Show by ProFora Media. Juned Sonido presented the trendy Lola Techie. Lola Techie is a character promoted by the BayanTel for their DSL service. The character became so famous after her TV commercial gained approval to the young and techie that age doesn’t matter when it comes to technology. And she eventually had her Twitter, Plurk, Facebook, and Youtube account. The product she endorses, BayanDSL, gained exposure and she became an instant web celebrity. On the other hand, Janette Toral showcased the search trends of Noynoy Aquino in terms of web presence for the past year until the recent quarter, and how will it probably affect on his running as a President in this coming 2010 Philippine Election, and how people uses social networks to promote his candidacy. (By the way, I invite you to join the VIRAL IDEAS Webinar Show every Tuesdays until December 29, 2009 from 8PM to 9PM PH time. Just click this link for more details.)

See how social networks can be of help to spread words easily? It’s like a virus! So, for business people with less web presence, you can start using social networking sites and reach out to people with great network value (in terms of individual reputation, network size, or online presence) and instantly increase popularity or sales.

So, this is the trend – online social networks collects people of same interest, so might as well make use of it for your viral marketing.

Reference: Data Mining – Concept & Techniques by Han, Jiawei, et. al.

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