Online advertising become a new trend in advertising after Amazon.com founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994 and launched online in 1995. After that, many companies started to build their own websites as their online advertising. Websites’ advantages efficiency of cost and space, and its user interface to help users serve themselves in buying things has made online advertising become a must as advertising strategy in selling their product.

Nowadays, Mobile Social Software (MoSoSo) is a new way to do online advertising. Mobile social software is a software that is designed to help people communicate to each other and it can be accessed anywhere anytime from mobile communication devices. It could be in a form of Short Messaging Services (SMS), Push Mail, or mobile instant messenger, software to connect to social networking websites, or mobile version of social networking websites. Mobile Social Software that were most used today are social networking website.

Facebook and Twitter are two social softwares that can be considered as the most two popular social networking websites that have been used for online advertising. A similarity between these two sites is both of them have a feature called status. This ‘status’ does not means relationship status like single, engaged, or married. It is more about what do you up to now? What are you doing right now? The difference of this ‘status’ feature between these two sites is the number of characters that can be used when users define their status. In Twitter, users can define with only 140 characters while in Facebook it is not limited.

How this ‘status’ feature work? Users can just simply type what are they feeling or what are they doing at the moment by typing it in a box served by the websites, just like filling a form and then submit it. At the beginning when this feature exists, users usually post status about their activity or their feeling. As time goes by, they start post something about many things like a quotes, reposting status from their friends, or a link to article that they consider interesting. This posting status and then became famous activity. It increases the use of internet significantly especially after Mobile Social Software makes updating status become more flexible. Mobile Social Software has help users to update their status anywhere anytime.

Many people saw this new trend as new opportunity for online advertising and start thinking a way exploit it. They create an account in Facebook and Twitter for their company and then ask their friends to be their ‘friends’ in their social networking sites. They update their status regularly about their products to attract their friends to use their products. If their service is satisfying, their friends usually will recommend it to their other friends and people usually believe it because the recommendation comes from their friends.

There are many other ways to use Mobile Social Software for online advertising like sending spam to mobile instant messenger or sending it through Push Mail, or embed an add-banner into the mobile websites. However, the main point is Mobile Social Software has their own implication to online advertising today.

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About the Author:
Muhammad Falah Wijaya is a student of University of Queensland majoring Information Technology, Brisbane, Australia. This article is made to fulfill his article assignment about Search Engine Optimizer (SEO) in course ADVT2506 (Online Advertising).
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