We all have witnessed the development of social media; we
have seen it grow like a little child. When Facebook released, not many people
had it but, it slowly and slowly built itself a name in which almost every
single person in America has an account! Same concept goes to Twitter; it also
slowly built itself fame. When Twitter first came out, I was totally against it;
I was not able to picture myself using it in any possible way! I did not like
the concept of “tweeting” in which I have to update my “followers” everything I
do! However, I am now hooked on it just like everybody else. As social media developed,
it helped us to stay connected with each other and entertained. Beside all the
fun, social media also made a great impact on businesses, especially marketers.
As a marketing student, I would like to provide few factors of how social media,
specifically Facebook and Twitter, has impact businesses.
Advertisements! Despite all the annoyance, complains of
spams and all that, on a marketer point of view, social media helped us by giving the opportunity to advertise effectively for… FREE! Not only it is ultimately
easy for us to just click the “send” or “share” button which allows us to
advertise to hundreds of users at the same time, it forces users to skim by!
However, social media advertising has quite died down as it is becoming a
serious spam and people are starting to get furious about this.
Social networking, of course! I am sure that social media
has been a useful tool for all of us to connect with friends and family. It
allowed us to communicate with each other, update each other and socialize!
Well now, all these are factors of social networking in which is an essential need
for success in business.
Updating potential customers… How easy is that now? If you
are in a business that requires you to constantly update your customers, do
yourself a favour; get Twitter! Unlike couple of years ago, where you would
have to find your potential customers to message them and keep them up to date with
your business, you can now just simply “Tweet!” This will automatically pop up
on all of your customer’s home screen and they will receive the information
right the way! Facebook with the status updates works too, but Twitter does a
better job!
There are many more social media out there (such as:
Blogger, MySpace, Tumbler, etc…) that are competing each other. You may find
them also very useful to have. Having said all the good side of social media,
there are of course many cons also. We all have experienced our worst enemies
of distraction when trying to focus… Social media is of course a big
distraction along with other qualities that may affect our success negatively.
However, the use of social media is still strongly recommended for all of you as
it will give you a big advantage in business!
What other social media accounts do you guys have beside Facebook and Twitter? Do you think social media is an essential need for business?
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