Six P's of youth social media from a young consumer's perspective

The purpose of this paper is to provide marketing professionals and researchers with an overview and understanding of core components that make up the current social media environment from a young consumer's perspective to enable successful communication, outreach and engagement techniques to be developed.

The paper combines personal and peer experiences, observations of user interaction and behavior on social media with the application of existing frameworks and campaigns to derive a complete picture of the social media environment.

The paper will provide insights into how social value creation can help companies large or small in creating positive social media presence while providing insights into the six P's of social media (person, profile, perception, peer, post, and pull) and their significance.

This paper is based primarily on a user and observer perspective with the intention of providing a succinct structural overview to aid future research and exploration. Empirical research should be conducted to verify and challenge assumptions made.

The insights provided can be used to design better social media engagement campaigns and explore future directions of research into developing measurement metrics for interactions and relationships between users and brands.

The creation of social value will be encouraged and better policies and support can be developed to address abuses of social media.

This paper is an original attempt to contextualize the new socially connected environment that we live in and combines insights from within with existing business frameworks to develop a potentially groundbreaking foundation framework on which future research and development by skilled researchers and practitioners can be based.