An Assessment Of Facebook And Radio Advertisements On The Purchasing Habits Of University Students.
[A CASE STUDY OF GODFREY OKOYE UNIVERSITY THINKERS CORNER ENUGU]

2.2.3 FACEBOOK.

According  to Margaret Rouse (2014)Facebook is a popular free-social networking website that allows registered users to create profiles, upload photos and video, send messages and keep in touch with friends, family and colleagues. The site, which is available in 37 different languages, includes public features such as:

• Marketplace - allows members to post, read and respond to classified ads.
• Groups - allows members who have common interests to find each other and interact.
• Events - allows members to publicize an event, invite guests and track who plans to attend.
• Pages - allows members to create and join.

Facebook is also defined as a type of social media, where people with common interest shares their ideas and comments in a virtual environment (Weber, 2009).

In February 2004, Mark Zuckerberg, with the help of Andrew McCollum and Eduardo Saverin, launched a website that would change online social interaction forever.

The Facebook started on the campus of Harvard University, where the three friends were students, Zuckerberg being a psychology major of all things. Within 24 hours of going live, The Facebook was a community of 1200 Harvard University students. The Facebook buzz grew on the Harvard campus and within weeks students from Stanford and Yale wanted in. The network was extended and by April 2004, The Facebook was available on all Ivy League servers. But Zuckerberg needed help to grow his little social networking site that could. He would not stop until The Facebook had been installed on all university campuses in America. In May 2004, only 4 months after The Facebook was born, he dropped out of Harvard and moved to Silicon Valley with McCollum and Dustin Moskovitz. In September 2004, they secured venture capital from PayPal founder Peter Thiel. The $500,000 investment was a start, but Zuckerberg and friends had big plans for The Facebook. Seeing the potential value in The Facebook, Jim Breyer and Accel Partners ponied up $12.7 million to assist Zuckerberg . By October 2004, Zuckerberg had the money, the manpower, and the institutional

backing to go global. Beta testing continued on within the American University

Population for the next year, and in August 2005, The Facebook dropped the “The” and Facebook.com was registered for $200,000. The network opened up, and within months anyone with a valid institutional email address from over 30,000 organizations across the planet were eligible for membership, including high school students, government employees and the corporate community.

In September 2006, Facebook expanded once again. Now anyone with a valid email address could sign up and populate their profile with their stats, and signup

they did. Even after a bit of bad press with the introduction of the “News Feed” feature, which was labeled intrusive and viewed as a violation of privacy by many of its long time users, membership continued to grow. In fact, between May 2006 and May 2007 Facebook traffic grew by an astonishing 89%.

Facebook remained a closed network until May 2007, when Zuckerberg announced that Facebook was to become the “social operating system for the Internet.” Up until that time, the Facebook platform was for Facebook alone, but now, users could integrate all of their Internet activities into their single Facebook profile. Developers quickly started to build applications for all the popular sites and users started adding them in an effort streamline their virtual identities. Flickr, MySpace, iTunes, YouTube, and Digg had official apps, and users started creating unofficial apps for these sites as well. Plus there was a whole host of independent developers creating quizzes, games, friend, organizers and a variety of profile customization apps like virtual gardens and profile picture sketches. CatBook and DogBook allowed users to create profiles for their pets to network with their friend’s pets, and Human Pets allowed users to become pets themselves for other users.

The next step for Facebook was direct advertising. In August 2007 Facebook announced that it was looking to “translate its popularity into bigger profits” by offering advertisers direct access to their targeted demographic consumers. Indeed, Zuckerberg and Co. were certainly within their right to exploit the popularity of the phenomena, why not? What’s the point of offering the service and collecting all this data if it can’t be used towards lining the company’s shareholders pockets? And if Facebook isn’t a massive Homeland Security Database, as some have speculated, advertising is all they got

2.2.4   BROADCAST MEDIA

Broadcast media describes the wide spectrum of different communication methods such as

• television,

• radio,

• newspapers,

• magazines

and any other materials supplied by the media and press.

2 .2.5   RADIO

Radio is a broadcast medium used for sending and receiving messages through the air using electronic waves. It is also about the activity of broadcasting programs for people to listen to the programs being broadcast (Idebi, 2008:1). It is the system of sending sound over a distance by transmitting electrical signals (BBC English Dictionary, 1992:946). It can also be defined as the broadcasting of programs for the public to listen to. In Nigeria research evidence shows that the use of radio as a medium of information is truly wide spread  (Okunna, 1992;Okigbo 1990; Sobowale and Sogbanmu , 1984)  Radio has the uncanny ability to reach a wide audience, as it has the ability to cross borders because firstly its cheap and so can be procured by anyone ,secondly  it operates without the use of electricity meaning that even those living in the rural areas would have access to it and the information that comes with it and they are broadcast in different languages .

According to Stephen Bernard (2002), “radio’s ability to survive in a competitive media environment has always depended on how well broadcasters tap into social, cultural and technological changes” . This is so because broadcasting on radio has become more easier with digital advancements. Radio has a disadvantage which is its transiency which means that once a particular information has been passed to a group of listeners at a specific time that information cannot be listened to again  unless it is repeated . According to Berry (2006) the transient nature of radio makes it ephemeral .  The transiency of radio is the fact radio messages are “irredeemable”. This is to say that, they are “irrepeatable” in the sense that once transmitted, the message is gone, unless otherwise, a repeat broadcast is scheduled (Lamptey ,2013).