Social communication requires the help of language, tools, media, etc. Language is the content transmitted during social communication, tools are used to process content, and media is the channel for disseminating content. The three together are to enable people to exchange information smoothly. Historically, these three have been constantly developing and improving, which has also caused the continuous changes in social forms. In the 19th century, after the invention of the telephone, the social method of “chatting on the phone” came into being; in the 20th century, the emergence of mobile phones allowed people to socialize through text messages; and today, the Internet is used for social communication. Using Internet technology, in the past 20 years, this industry has provided people with different forms of social tools such as instant messaging, e-mail, BBS, blogs, wikis, etc.; in the past 10 years, we have begun to use a new generation of online social platforms represented by Twitter and Facebook, and the concept of SNS has almost become a special name for this type of new platform.
The new generation of SNS platforms is both a tool and a medium. We use various content editing tools provided by SNS platforms, such as rich text editors, photo streams, voice chat, etc., combined with the input methods, cameras and microphones of desktop devices, mobile devices, car-mounted devices, etc. to create rich, recordable and disseminable content, using dynamic pages as storage media. At the same time, through a complete interactive system consisting of tools such as attention, forwarding, @, and comments on the SNS platform, a new form of communication media has been formed.
Since new social content is stored in the form of dynamic pages for a long time, and can even be stored permanently in theory, this type of content can be easily copied, backed up, and re-edited, greatly reducing the production and storage costs of marketing content, which is the largest cost in the early stage of marketing; through the new communication media system, the content we create can use Web technology and the six-degree network of connections established on the SNS platform to achieve exponential rapid dissemination and coverage among different users.
With these favorable factors, as IT technologies in language, tools, and media continue to develop, and new interactive technologies such as VR have emerged, marketing activities based on online social networking have extremely strong potential.