Online advertising has been used by many companies today as sustainable resource to increase their sales and ease their marketing. Many companies create their own website usually as an online catalogue of their product to help their customers serve themselves before they deal with the transaction. They also put add-banner in other websites to attract people visit their websites. A new trend in online advertising is the use of Mobile Social Software (MoSoSo).
MoSoSo basically is a mobile version of social software. Social software itself is software to help people connect to each other. It can be Short Messaging Service (SMS), instant messenger, email, or social networking website. Mobile social software makes many social softwares accessible from mobile communication device anywhere anytime. This software has increase the use of social software because of its easiness and its flexibility.
Short Messaging Service (SMS) is one popular MoSoSo that is frequently used for online advertising. Many company approach mobile phone providers and pay them to send SMS to their customer for special promotion product. Other company like cinemas also use SMS as their service. They use SMS to ease their customer see their movies’ schedule.
Another popular MoSoSo is mobile version of social networking websites. Examples of social networking websites are Facebook and Twitter. These two social networking websites are very popular and used worldwide because of its ability to connect people from their closest persons to their long-time-no-see relatives like childhood friends. Another factor that made Facebook and Twitter popular is their ‘status’ feature. The idea of this feature is most of people in this world love to share to each other. By using this feature, users can share to their friends in their Facebook or Twitter about their activity, about their feeling, they also can share quotes or a link to web-article that they think interesting. Surprisingly, even though ‘status’ feature only let their users to express their feeling through limited characters, it has increase the use of Facebook and Twitter. The high access to this website and then encourage many software developers to develop MoSoSo like mobile Facebook, uberTwitter, or Tweet60 to access those two social network websites from mobile communication devices. Because of its flexibility, MoSoSo and then successfully made the use of Facebook and Twitter even higher.
The high internet traffic from Facebook and Twitter and then got utilized by many parties to advertise their product by online. They find this new trend in social networking websites will be very beneficial for their online advertising. These people and then create an account in Facebook and Twitter for their company. They invite their friends to be their friends in their social networking websites. After that, they update their status regularly. They attract their friends to buy their products or services by giving special offers or promo through their status. If the offered products or services can give a satisfaction, their friends usually will recommend them to their other friends and it usually powerful because people believe that recommendation from friends can be trusted. So this is more like mouth-to-mouth advertising.
In conclusion, the use of Mobile Social Software as a media for online advertising has help many companies increase their sales and spread information about their product more abroad.