Business prospective on social networking services

A social networking service promotes on building online communities of people from different activities, groups, or who are interested to exploring the interest of others. We can find out many online social networking services now a day’s who are very popular and people are grabbing their services like a hot cake. To some people they cannot even think of a single day without browsing their social networking portfolio. That is why a real time business aspect is increasingly spreading its way to this online world. Social network is a new virtual but rationally realistic world of communication and sharing activities with low cost which open doors for entrepreneurs and small businesses. Business prospects on social networking services has diversity of different aspects and beneficial for service provider. We can find out aspects in business to business (B2B) or business to consumers (B2C). We can involve some more values than traditional social networking services and can involve business aspects with bigger sense with some new ideas. Business can be involved with SNS (Social Networking Services) with all its activities and not only serving the advertising, marketing buying/selling, customer relationships but emerging other educational and human acknowledgement factors. Social networking service can interconnect all types of human to fulfill their desired interest only if we can incorporate business services with it in every possible way.

2.    What is Social Networking?

A social network is built on social relationship within a social structure. This human made social structure has been possible with nodes that are tied up with various types of dependency, like values, vision, ideas, work differences, experiences, knowledge, friendship, conflict trade and many other factors. This social network relationship network can be visualized with nodes and ties, where nodes are identified as individual actor in a network and ties are defined as the relationship between the actors. We can find many groups of society within a network of different types. Now the actor will choose its group and will build ties with other actors.

Social networking so far has created a new way of communication and share of information.  Social networking services are used by millions of people every day and it seems like it has become a part of daily life. In an example FACEBOOK and MySpace got over 10 million people all around the world and people keep trust on them as a way to find new friends, group and communication.

Some social networking online services are listed below:

• Facebook
• MySpace
• LinkedIn (popular for professional networking)
• Hi5
• Bebo
• Orkut
• Tagged and many more

Each of these social networks has its own purpose and different activities. Some of them are zonal based on world culture and some of them are related to professional work.

3.    Social Networking Structure

Generally all social networking services perform a profile input by the users at the first time, where users are requested to fill their personal, educational and professional information.  The key feature of social networkers is connecting people with their feeling and interest. This structure can be broken down into two parts: Internal Social Networking (ISN) (1) and External Social Networking (ESN) (2). An ISN is mainly based on a internal company community where every activities will be within a company, association, society, education provider and organization. On the other hand an ESN is an open community. ESN is a target for the advertisers and business organization. We call ESN as pure social networker where endless people will come and create their profile and share their activities and thoughts. Some social networking site is created for the benefit of others such as GURGUL.

Some social networks are based on a targeted market, like India is highly motivating matrimonial online services for dating and marriage. We can give an example of a matrimonial website like SHAADI.COM which is a trying to build a global community and providing dating and marital services for singles and divorced people of different culture and religion.

4.    Why it is popular?

Popularity of social networking is deeply rooted on how the sites support sociality amongst pre existing friends group. Many teens maintain some time for browsing via FACEBOOK or MySpace to be connected with friends and get their desired need. We can understand current culture of social networking according to following comments taken from a research work:

“Just because I’m on the computer at 2:30am, doesn’t mean I’m up to no good. Like last night (my mom) comes in and yells at me to go to bed. When I don’t, she is all ‘well what are you doing, show me what you’re doing.’ Of course I was lurking MySpace profiles, cause there is nothing better to do, but that’s annoying to explain, she wouldn’t understand.” – PAM 17 (3)

Another comment by Mary Richart who has commented on GUARDIAN:

“It seems we're finally starting to use the internet for its intended purpose: communication and information sharing. If you think of the internet as a model for the collective human brain, it's encouraging to know that slightly more than half of it is occupied by subjects other than sex, and that we are, in fact, still quite interested in forming meaningful connections to one another. Yep, that was the point all along, but at least initially, it was much easier to simply put smutty pictures on a website than facilitate real human interaction.” – MARY RICHERT (4)

Social network services drawing more and more users under their hood not because they are opening doors for new friends but because they are offering a communication gateway to existing users with cheaper cost than phone calls or even for free. Moreover some of these services are offering business opportunities and knowledge sharing modules where professional s can easily meet their goals.

5.    Business opportunities

“Social networking has never been as crucial and beneficial to companies. In our technical world your next business prospect could only be a mouse-click away.” – Laura Lake (5)

We can agree with above statement. Many entrepreneurs and small business stakeholders are investing their valued money in this sector. SNS has become one of key sources of easy advertising and marketing as well. Stakeholders are trying to implement new ideas and opportunities in front of the users and trying to have their profit share by providing various services.

According to eMarketer (6) 33% of small businesses indicated that they would keep spending on social networking about the same, while only 5% reported that they plan to spend less than in the previous year.

 Technology has given business a way of making everything automated and online based. That is why most of the business is trying reaching their customers as well as their suppliers through online, because it is cheap, easy to manage and require less human resources.

6.    Scopes and Ideas

Social networking services are still new and growing with its full phase. There are lots of scopes where business can focus activities and appear a direct involvement.  As a preliminary stage some ideas can be incorporated along with these services where key motivation should be “WORLD ON ONE PAGE”. I personally believe it is possible at the era of technological development. We can share knowledge, send emails, chat with friends, do business, learning new things, attend meetings, getting updated news, complete essential tasks, searching and can do many more at one single place. To get that we can think about a interconnected social networking service where a virtual world is presented by many third party services.

We can present some proposal to the SNS providers and to business stakeholders as well:

·         Create a module for instant alert system. Mails will be pushed to handheld or as messaging services to normal mobile phones.

·         Create a business network close to local area for small business and worldwide network for global business according to entrepreneurs profile and their interests

·         Including online parcel sending module with gifts. Where many local shops will be connected and parcels can send by well established parcel carriers like FEDEX, TNT or in local ROYEL MAIL.

·         General Banking services can be included.

·         While putting users profile users can be asked for their national ID number. They will be easily identified through the main database under proper authentication and authorization. Thus the security will be improved and a person will not able to use more than one profile.

·         Connect with local events and national events

·         Make sure knowledge gets to people who acts on time

·         Schools and College works and learning system can be merged as a test.

·         Share individual intellect and get a combined idea.

·         Promote professionals and skilled peoples, search for employee and employers.

And more but still these ideas are at their preliminary stage and need some research and testing.

7.    Conclusion

Measuring business prospective on social networking services has a vast potential for research work and gathering new ideas for new entrepreneurs.  It does have some history of potential misuse but still this is a growing sector. Stakeholder can find a new way of potential profit and can establish a well structured network for virtual human world.

 

Bibliography

1. Anderson, Tac. Using Social Networking Sites For Internal Communications. HP COMMUNITIES. [Online] HP, JULY 29, 2008. http://www.communities.hp.com/online/blogs/marketing/archive/2008/07/29/using-social-networking-sites-for-internal-communications.aspx.

2. Facebook is... A simple look of cyberissues on a semi-regular basics. [Online] February 16, 2008. http://cyberstudies.blog.com/ESN/.

3. Boyd, Danah. Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics. Cambridge : Youth, Identity, and Digital Media Volume (ed. David Buckingham). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press., 2007.

4. Richert, Mary. Social networking sites like Facebook are now more popular than porn sites, but does that mean we want real relationships? GUARDIAN.CO.UK. [Online] OCTOBER 23, 2008. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2008/oct/23/internet-social-networking-facebook.

5. Lake, Laura. Social Networking Communities Provide Marketing Opportunities. ABOUT.COM. [Online] ABOUT.COM. http://marketing.about.com/od/relationshipmarketing/a/businessnetwork.htm.

6. EMARKETER. Small Businesses' Online Plans. EMARKETER.COM. [Online] JANUARY 12, 2009. http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?id=1006847.

7. Ostrow, Adam. Social Networking Still the #1 Growth Area in Online Marketing. MASHABLE.COM. [Online] JANUARY 12, 2009. http://mashable.com/2009/01/12/social-networking-online-marketing/.