The Impact of Social Media on the Business World and Our Life - Essay Example

Critically evaluate the impact of social media on the business world and our life. Table of Contents Introduction 4 Thesis ment 4 Discussion 5 The emergence of social media has benefited human lives 5 Act as a communication tool for human lives 5 Discover creative work 5 Utilized for individual purpose 6 Increases knowledge 6 Encourage to give power in people’s hand 7 The emergence of social media has benefitted businesses 7 Potential of finding new customers 8 Reduce costs 8 Word of mouth marketing 9 Raise business exposure 9 Competitive lead 9 Strengthen customer loyalty 10 Case Study Examples 10 Disadvantages of social media with solution 11 Identity theft 11 Addiction for students 11 Reduce productivity 12 Conclusion 12 References 14 Bibliography 15 Introduction Social media has created a significant impact on modern civilization. The fast evolving social media has revolutionized that way people connect, interact and stay updated on the recent development of particular industry. Social media has created a platform for users to discuss and share their information and also helped them to create their own identity and reputation via online. Latest survey reveals that ninety percent of the online users are some way or another uses social media. Social media can be described as the application and websites that enables users to interact between each other and exchanging details of their lives such as personal information, biographical data and professional information. The emergence of social media from web 2.0 has created a huge impact on the current scenario of commercial environment. The utilization of social media has changed the way people communicate and human relationship dynamics has taken a new perspective. The history of internet has changed drastically due to the revolution of social media and made internet technologies inclusive. Social media has become largest web presence for many businesses which overtakes email and company websites. It is really hard to find any people who does not exercise any forms of social media which can be application and websites. This essay will follow the statement about the emergence of social media has huge impact on human lives and businesses. Thesis statement The emergence of social media has created huge impact on human lives and businesses. Discussion The emergence of social media has benefited human lives Social media has provided people a platform that encourage them to share their views, news and opinions that are happening around the globe. Factor that enables to the growth of this technology is due to their ability of producing user-generated content. At an unprecedented level, social media allows users to connect with each other. It has become inevitable part of human lives. Social media has created a global reach for human beings via internet. The benefit of social media on human lives is enormous as it helps users to share knowledge, information and communicate. Advantages of social media are discussed below: Act as a communication tool for human lives Social media enrich human lives by helping them to communicate effectively and regularly with other people. In earlier days, technology used to be more intensive and it required experts to handle it. But over the period, development of technology and platforms helped users to actively use the services without requirement of any expertise in technological background. Social media acts as a wonderful communication tool for people to interact with each other at any place and time. From teenagers to seniors, everyone is connected to the social media to communicate about their issues that are important to their lives. Social media provides the ideal platform to make it achievable. Discover creative work Social media enables individuals to discover creative works. Social media provides perfect platform for people to show creative works to others. Creative works can be writing, poem or creating blogs. There are many people to loves to write stories, poems or on any anonymous topic. Those people have opportunity to create their blog and share it to the whole world so that people knows about the creative writing. Blogs provides people to write their opinion about any topic or subjects. Popular sites like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. allow people to share their creative writing or views. There are also many creative writing sites for creative writer that allows people to show their creativity and sometimes can get reward for best one. Utilized for individual purpose People can use social media sites solely for their own purpose. Personal purpose can be mainly updating with latest news and activities that are undergoing worldwide. People can use social media website like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. to chat with the people, friends and colleagues. Many email clients has the option to live chat with each other. Email clients such as Gmail and video Chat application like Skype provides opportunity for people to live video chat with their friends. People can send message through e-mail clients or chat application. WhatsApp is the popular instant chat application which also allows people to chat, send pictures and videos. Increases knowledge Use of social media is constantly growing. Social media platforms help people to increase their knowledge. The increment in knowledge can be related to the study oriented or can be general. Materials shared by teachers or peers can be very useful to gain knowledge. Teachers may share graphs, links and photographs which are valuable. This can provide solution for many difficult queries. Encourage to give power in people’s hand Social media has provided power in people hand to create hype on certain issue on social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google+, etc. Social media has enabled people to share their experiences of vacations to their friends, families and colleagues. This all can be done without any effort. People have power to write their opinions can create a social influence. Social media provides fastest medium for users to share their content which can go viral in minutes. People can store their memorable pictures and files in their social networking sites. The emergence of social media has benefitted businesses Social media has provided opportunity for businesses without splurging exorbitant amount of money on marketing and advertising to reach out to the potential customers. It enables businesses to stay in touch with the customers. Every organization cannot ignore the fact that social media creates opportunity to connect with the customers. People can suggest that business is keeping up with the changing times or on the cutting edge when business has presence on popular social networking sites. The survey from Social Media Examiner suggests that social media has provided medium and small-sized business increase in exposure by 89%. Social media is new to some businesses as report says that for two years 59% of business use social media to grow their business. 90% of adult, social media has become a vital part for any business. The importance of social media cannot be ignored by any organization as it can affect their brand reputation and reduces opportunity to enhance business. It brings awareness of any organization. The wider audiences can lead to more potential customers which is better for an organization. The benefits of social media on businesses are being discussed. Potential of finding new customers Social media enables businesses to reach out to the new customers. Traditional strategies used to provide less ROI than social media. Every company requires wider exposure of their businesses to be successful. Social media provides platform for businesses to reach out the maximum number of target customers through advertising, publicity and sales promotion. One way to find out new customers is by interacting with current customers. Several popular social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc. enables to reach out to the customers. Businesses can tweet on Twitter or post on Facebook offering special discounts to every current customer who likes or follows the businesses on these social media sites. Company can also offer special discount or offers to the new customers if they join the network. Social media can not only help to find new customers but also produce inbound leads. The number of likes and follow on company page on social networking sites creates an opportunity for businesses to find out number of people is feeling good about the products. The way of communication with the target customer is changed with the emergence of social media. Reduce costs The ability of posting a message on Facebook or twitting a message on Twitter is far more cost effective than that of mailing marketing pieces or running paid ad. The great thing about social media is that the results and budget of a company are not linear. When it is compared with many budget-draining techniques for advertising, social media is effectively cost-efficient. Conventional marketing techniques such as magazines, newspaper and television are not effective anymore. But promoting business on social media enables to reduce costs and also reach more people. Almost every social networking sites free to create a profile and enables companies to direct contact with the customers without using single penny. Word of mouth marketing Word of mouth is nothing but oral communication of passing information from one person to another. Social media is the platform for businesses to reach target customers by word of mouth. News which is popular and entertaining is always spreads from one person to another. Customer who are using the products of a company and are very satisfied about the product will eventually tell to other person about the product. In this scenario, the customers of a company can act as a marketing agent. When a company launches some new product in Facebook then customers who are in the network of company can like the product (Mathews, 2012, p.3). Other people who are in the friend list of the customers can see the like and for instance can look the product and like it. The survey reveals that, the advert magazines are not trusted by the people as much as people trust the opinion of peers. Raise business exposure It is been reported that Twitter and Facebook serves more than 1.5 billion users worldwide. Social media can help company to grow their business beyond immediate geographic area. It is the fastest way of communication with the people which can cross states, countries and national lines. Social media is the best convenient way for a business for augmenting brand visibility. Whether it is local or a global business, social media can effectively increase business exposure by reaching as many target customers as possible. Competitive lead Every events or discussions that are happening in social media sites are all in real time. Social media provides distinctive competitive advantage to the businesses those are engaging and participating in advertising which are relevant. It also becomes easier to monitor the work done by competitors in social media sites. Strengthen customer loyalty Social media can help to strengthen the company brand. Every successful business requires strong customer loyalty base. Loyal customers are those who are satisfied with the company products. Instead of company brand name and value, a customer looks at the company’s concern towards them and providing necessary feedback. Strong customer loyalty and relationship can be maintained when business is interacting with them at comfortable level. Every customer has queries and issues which can be solved by business with the help of social media. Business has the opportunity to send newsletter via email with help of social media. The quality of posts by company on social media sites is very vital to maintain customer loyalty (Funk, 2011, p.147). For example, if a company is posting insights about their company or any interesting information then customer will fell they are respected and therefore most likely customers are going to remain loyal to the company. Case Study Examples Popular instant messaging app WhatsApp was founded in the year 2009. WhatsApp was founded by ex-Yahoo engineers Jan Koum and Brian Acton. This application has become popular among the users as it boasts 450 million monthly users daily. From 450 million users, 72% of the users use WhatsApp daily. The millions of active users base on WhatsApp is fastest than any other company in history. Astonishingly more than 19 billion of messages are sent daily. Social giant networking service, Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004. Facebook bought WhatsApp for whopping $19 billion. This is the largest acquisition by Facebook. Facebook provided opportunity people for opening businesses as it enables businesses to reach to the people who matters most. There are millions of potential customers on social media sites like Facebook. It enables people who are new to open business to create content through online community and interact with the people worldwide. Social media helps to attract new customers and promote brand name and business. Therefore businesses are using social as a medium to broad reach. Another popular video-sharing, photo sharing and social networking service is Instagram. In 2012, Facebook acquired Instagram for $1 billion in stock and cash. Instagram also enables businesses to communicate with the users but through the use of images. It can create business awareness. Instagram is same as other social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Compelling images on Instagram can help to attract customers and drive traffic. Images can attract customer’s attention. Businesses can use Instagram to reach target customers. Disadvantages of social media with solution Identity theft The information, pictures and comment that are posted on the social networking site is almost available to everyone. Most of the hackers just require small personal information to steal the identity or hack the account. It is always necessary for every people to be careful on updating personal details. But this problem has been is some way dealt with social networking sites. Social networking sites such as Facebook is much more secure now. There are many options that are installed by Facebook to lock the personal details or have option to include some of their close friends to view the details. Facebook has now become more secured with the inclusion of hiding the settings from other intruders (Mitic, 2009, p.79). Addiction for students Facebook is one of the popular social media site for most users. More than 900 million users are active on Facebook. But it has become the cause for social media addiction. There is no wrong with using social media sites but when people become more engaged then it can become an issue. The student’s academic performance can be degraded by spending hours on social media sites. This addiction can be prevented by managing time. Engage in other activities such as sport activities can reduce addiction. Reduce productivity Worker productivity can be negatively influenced by social networking sites. The valuable time of employees can be wasted due to the use of social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Google+. The time spend of social media sites instead of working can eventually reduce company’s reputation. It can prove as a distraction for employees as they waste their on social networks rather than work task. This negativity has been removed by the introduction of new technology that enables company to restrict social networking sites in offices. The introduction of new technology has managed to maintain the productivity of an organization. Conclusion Finally, it can be concluded that social media has created a huge impact on businesses and human lives. The emergence of social media has changed the way of people to interact with each other. Social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Google+ has become vital part of human life and businesses. Social network technology provides opportunity for companies to market their new products. It has become hub of many people where they can share their experiences, views and referrals. It has become inevitable part of businesses to increase their brand value and launch new products. The use of social media has changed the way of people sharing their thoughts and opinions. Social media marketing enables company to maintain their growth regardless of the size of companies. Social media can help businesses to gain competitive advantage over rivals. For every company to sustain in the competitive market it is necessary to create a better social media business operation strategy. References Funk, T., 2011. Social Media Playbook for Business. New York: ABC-CLIO. Mathews, J., 2012. Social Media Marketing for Business owners. London: Book-Tango. Mitic, S., 2009. Stopping Identity Theft: 10 easy steps to security. London: Nolo. Bibliography Chappell, B., 2014. Facebook Will Buy WhatsApp Message Service For $19 Billion. [Online]. Available at: < http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/02/19/279763675/facebook-will-buy-whatsapp-message-service-for-19-billion>. [Accessed on March 23, 2014]. IFAC., 2012. Guide to Practice Management for Small- and Medium-Sized Practices. [PDF]. Available at: < http://www.ifac.org/sites/default/files/publications/files/SMP-Practice-Management-Guide-3e.pdf> [Accessed on March 23, 2014]. Kennesaw., 2012. Kennesaw State University Social Media Policy. [PDF]. Available at: . [Accessed on March 23, 2014]. New Media., 2011. New Media, When Does Integration go too far? [Online]. Available at: . [Accessed on March 23, 2014]. Read More