The Internet has long become a means of social construction of reality: individuals participate in the creation of reality, which they perceive. The worldwide network has penetrated deeply into our daily life, and social networks have become a platform where it is convenient to create your own image. As Umberto Eco wrote: "When you visit home pages, you find that the goal of many people is to demonstrate their uninteresting normality, or, worse, uninteresting abnormality."
Historical reference
Fidonet, a non-profit computer network that emerged in 1984, can be considered the prototype of the first social network. Its main purpose was to exchange text messages (for everything else, it was not suitable) - that is, in banal communication. Fido was caught only by "veterans" (or, more simply, geeks) - after all, in those days even a laptop was a miracle for many, and the younger generation can hardly imagine a network in which one can only exchange information.
For a long time, forums and chats have been the main platform for communication on the Internet. Thanks to forums, people were united by interests and topics, and chats were convenient for real-time messaging. 1995 became outstanding in the history of social networks, when the platform Сlassmates.com appeared - an analogue of Odnoklassniki. It was this project that gave birth to many similar platforms that have become more popular than the original.
A definite turning point can be considered 2002 when Rupert Murdoch founded MySpace. Around this time, other social networks began to be born, including the giant Facebook.
The appearance of Odnoklassniki was a significant event in Runet - for a few unprepared people from the CIS countries, Facebook and its analogues were too complicated. But the social network "Vkontakte", which was originally conceived and created), turned the game upside down with closed registration only by "invite" for graduates of elite schools and universities. But the popularity of the service grew so quickly that soon its creator Pavel Durov made the registration open. Gradually, the site became more and more like Facebook (for which Durov was repeatedly criticized): for example, the “wall” ceased to be a place for communication and creation of funny graffiti, but turned into a microblogging. Some site users still remember how indignant this caused the community: users put the threatening "Durov, return the wall!" On their avatar. and promised not to enter the Vkontakte network until their demands are heard.
In contact with
One of the main advantages over other social networks is the availability of video and audio recordings that you can upload yourself and search for in the database. Despite the administration's attempts to fight piracy, Vkontakte can still find almost everything you are looking for.
But from the point of view of promoting a certain brand, product or just a community, the site is interesting in the following points:
- you can invite subscribers to create content on their own and send it for moderation;
- most of the viral content appears in VK. If you take advantage of this feature, you can quickly attract attention to yourself;
- your content can be posted (offered) in other thematic communities (of which there are simply many in VK);
- recently, VK allows you to set up targeted advertising and monitor the success of the community thanks to statistics;
- you can use an unusual design of the community thanks to the ability to use codes.
Therefore, when using Vkontakte for commercial purposes, you should remember: the overwhelming majority of the audience there is young and comes to the site with entertainment content. It is a platform for informal communication, searching for music and saving funny photos.
Classmates
Internet users often joke about Odnoklassniki for the low quality of the content: for the fact that the service is used by older people, most of the materials distributed there concern such topics as home-garden-family, and the site often becomes a platform for political disputes.
Regarding the age of users, this is an intermediate link between Vkontakte and Odnoklassniki. A large number of Facebook users: they are IT specialists, representatives of business and creative professions. That is why this social network is most often used to promote a certain brand.
Facebook has the following advantages:
- a convenient assistant for setting up advertising;
- automatically "raises" popular posts so that they can be seen by as many people as possible;
- makes communication with other companies convenient through a large number of corporate pages;
- provides detailed statistics on the development of the community.
The blog format makes it possible for a certain person to tell about their work through themselves, to de-anonymize the brand and give it a human face. And by sharing a funny story from life, you can become an Internet star in a few hours. In addition, posts with indignation and negativity repeatedly drew attention to certain problems, and the presence on Facebook of a large number of businessmen and experts who could comment on the situation instantly forced the state and certain organizations to resolve some issue. By the way, the presence of many public figures in this network allows you to learn news firsthand and as quickly as possible, and a smart news feed to choose the most interesting posts for everyone.
Twitter is very beneficial for promoting a product where the principle of "here and now" is important - for example, news resources, and also allows you to combine the pages of a certain person or brand in other social networks: the format of a short message is convenient for sharing links. Even finding the owner's cat on Twitter can be convenient: just write “please retweet”. The function of world trends helps to track what the owners of microblogs are talking about now, and by watching hashtags, you can, for example, see what emotions the new series of "Sherlock" evoked.
