Reshetnikova I., Kasian S. Y., Reutskova O. M.

Oles Honchar Dnipropetrovsk National University

SOCIAL NETWORK AS A VEHICLE OF MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS

Today the speed of delivering information to the target audience is one of the most important indicators of the effectiveness of promotion strategies, in particular media support for any communication project. To cover the target audience of 50 million people for such media as radio it took 38 years, for television – much 13 years. But for the coverage of such a great number of audience of the Internet it took only four years. The Internet has become an in dispensable medium for conducting business activities and the platform for marketing communications. Today there is a special feature of consumer behavior. They are more interested in the views of members of social environment about a product than the evaluation of search engines. About 80% of consumerstrust there commendations of users of social networks and only 14% – traditional advertising.

Complex system of marketing communications means the totality of methods and forms of information transmission (advertising, personal selling, sales promotion, direct marketing, etc.) aimed at that audience to achieve goals of an enterprise. A vehide of marketing communication is an important factor for a successful product promotion, rapid achievement of target audience, correct decoding links. Using such tool as advertising, the advertiser has to understand that a vehide is an important factor for efficien advertising campaign, because the width of audience coverage of the audience, accuracy of reports depend on it.

Social networks as advertising vehicles have a number of advantages. They are: specific composition of the audience, high efficiency of campaign management and feedback, ability to measure performance, lower cost of contact in comparison with other media. For several years of its existence social networks, have become the most popular sites on the Internet. For example, the largest social network is Facebook founded in 2004 by Mark Tsukenberg. The number of users for September 2011 totaled more than 800 million people. The main audience of the network are people of 18-35 years old. That is, the promotion of a brand or product on Facebook is appropriate for the company in which the target audience corresponds the mentioned age range. Thus, we can come to the following conclusion. The site is actual for promotion of fashion food aimed at young people – drinks, snacks, catering establishments and others. Interest in the use of social media as a vehicle for product and brand promotion in Ukraine is constantly growing, and this is not a chance as there is a number of reasons for it:

-  domestic marketers are observing the examples of Western companies, annually increasing the budget allocated for promotion in social networks;

-  social networks are growing rapidly and soon they will cover a larger part of the solvent population of the countries;

-  the possibility of exact hit in a target audience;

Users draw less attention to traditional resources and effectiveness of promotion through them is lower.

Product or brand promotion in social media should be deliberate and gradual, as well as any other communication tool. So these are examples of the stages of promotion in social networks:

- development of a promotion plan;

- creating a visual image of a company in the network;

- attraction of new users;

- support of an object and additional resources.

Thus, the biggest advantage of social media as a lever of product or brand promotion is the size of the audience, and the fact that most of it have joined network recently, penetrate the Internet through social media and is still loyal to network advertising.