THE POWER OF SOCIAL NETWORK APPS: PHOTO-CONTEST BASED APPLICATION STUDY

The Internet is definitely not a new medium any more. In its 20 odd year life, it has changed and transformed almost every aspect of our social and business interaction. However, it is still developing and it will influence the future with global penetration and its technological capabilities. Futurists predict that a global network such as Internet will not only connect all devices and things but living beings as well. There is a lot of evidence to this theory even now. Parallel with strong growth of global internet penetration, new forms of communication and advertising have been developing simultaneously. One of the major trends was and still is social network utilization. Almost instantly, mass popularity and diverse interactivity rapidly attracted businesses to different social networks, with Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram currently being the most popular ones, even within different businesses sectors. The most popular one is still Facebook with more than 1.2 billion monthly active users as of December 2013. Businesses are finding new and different ways of interactive communication with their fans and target groups on Facebook so its developers are constantly refining the communication process also adding certain restrictions. This happens with 2 goals in mind: allowing users and businesses to use the potential of this communication platform and steering the ship in profi table waters. Along the typical Facebook based communication forms, lots of businesses are using third-party applications within the same platform with very impressive results. The aim of this paper is to explore the current forms of different communication techniques for business pages on Facebook while talking into account the relevant trends in social networking. In addition, this paper will describe and evaluate a specific photo-contest based application within Facebook.