2. What is Viral Marketing? Viral marketing is a strategy that allows companies to post marketing messages and ads, which internet users forward to each other (sometimes not knowing that they are included in the message), over many different types of social media sites. These messages or ads multiply rapidly and are sent to thousands of people, just like viruses.
3. History of Viral Marketing Most individuals believe that viral marketing is new and does not have much history, but it is actually just over ten years old now (when people really started to use social media sites). The old form of viral marketing used to be referred to as “word of mouth,” which has been around forever! That is when an individual tells another individual something and it spreads around to many people. Companies use this to their advantage because it is a free way of marketing a product. The only difference is that viral marketing is over the internet.
12. Many competitors can easily imitate the viral marketing techniques and steal the market from other companies
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14. Examples of Viral Marketing Hotmail Example: Most of Hotmail’s success was due to viral marketing, when it first launched. When an outgoing e-mail was sent through Hotmail, there was an attached ad at the bottom of the page inviting the person who received the e-mail to join Hotmail. There are millions of e-mails sent and received through Hotmail a day, that means that these messages would get passed along to millions of people each day. Facebook, Twitter and My Space Example: The ads that are usually on the right side of the page on Facebook, Twitter and My Space are considered viral marketing. These ads are all over these social media pages everyday. Millions of people see them, click on them and they may even purchase something from these ads. Companies use these social media websites to advertise because millions of people see them, but they can also target these ads toward their target market (age, gender, interests, etc).
