Relationship marketing through social networking sites

In the last five years, social media has become a dominant force on the Internet. Social networking websites, the most popular of which is Facebook, accounted for 20 percent of all time spent on the Internet. Relationship Marketing has seen new light in this channel. There are two reasons for this. First, consumers do not pay for using these services on most social networking sites. Second, firms are not spending large amounts of money trying to access consumers using these new channels. This is despite the fact that there are obvious marketing applications for a form of media that allows companies to ob-serve potential consumers’ social interactions. Most firms’ commercial strategies for social media have emphasized the success of “earned reach, ” a strategy by which a brand develops its pool of subscribers organically and also aims to expand that pool by seeing existing subscribers share links with their social networks. This paper presents definitions of Relationship Marketing and socialnetwork websites in detail and reasons for growing importance of relationship marketing through social networking sites.