Consumer demand for instant service has shifted the trend towards online communication. Online social networking users are growing rapidly. Their market share has increased by approximately five times since 2005 8% to 38% today. People are looking to get value out of their social practice and social media is here to offer them a valuable social experience.
Social networking is beneficial for organizations. Particularly, news organizations, innovators by nature, are looking for alternative profitability opportunities via more knowledgeable and productive enterprise solutions that can drive innovation into products faster.
One of the reasons that social networking has attracted so much attention is because it aligns with the organization's aspiration to reach out to broader communities. By offering the enormous potential to operate in a secure interactive environment, social media drive primarily behavioral changes in journalism.
The availability of faster and cheaper Internet access has increased people's connectivity globally. Anyone involved in the news industry knows that connectivity and interactivity in the form of e-mails, blogs, hyperlinks and podcasts is the door to a broader audience.
Today, news organizations become members of existing online communities. With the enormous advancement of technology, the news industry can inform the public instantly, efficiently and interactively using several methods.
Through corporate blogs, news organizations enable community members to comment on the company's marketing and branding strategies in an interactive format that allows instant communication. For instance, the organization may post breaking news the moment they happen and receive instant feedback on its practices from millions of users who will be online at that moment.
By setting up passports accounts in various social networking sites, news organizations extend their branding strategies. Some of the most used social networking sites are Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Digg, StumbleUpon, Wordpress, Technorati and LinkedIn.
Participating in corporate forums offers the opportunity to interact with other community members who share the same aspirations and face the same challenges. News organizations can measure their influence and develop new strategies so as to attract a larger audience.
Social networking has also its challenges. The first and most difficult step is to identify the audience. Where do people spend time online? There is a plethora of social networking sites. They are all potential places to find followers, and each has it strengths and weaknesses. The trick is in knowing how to use them.
Large sites such as Facebook have millions of users, and hence, a great potential audience. On the other hand, because the audience is huge, the message that the organization aims at conveying may not be heard. Therefore, news organizations, typically, use large sites as a hub to place billboards and not to create significant relationships with community members. In contrast, smaller sites are, normally, dedicated to specific causes and, hence, the audience is smaller. Consequently, news organizations use smaller sites to convey specific messages.
Another challenge is that the fact that there are journalists who regularly use online communities in a provocative way. They may use Facebook or MySpace for personal promotion and connection with personal friends rather than promoting their organization through their work. All these behaviors require balancing mechanisms that can set clear boundaries between personal and professional.
In effect, social networking is about building relationships with the audience. Promoting good journalistic work over social networks is an efficient method for getting stories out and attracting audience. To achieve that, news organizations need to use social media authentically and transparently and promote open communication with their audience. In addition, they need to create and maintain interactive platforms that can support a two-way dialogue of innovative media outlets so as to facilitate the increasing number of visitors in social network sites.