Social Media

Social Media

Introduction

The medium of social media employs the use of internet and mobile technologies for purposes of marketing. For any business to prosper and grow, marketing is the most important feature of any business strategy. Millions of dollars are spent by large businesses whether they are automobile sellers or healthcare organizations to market their business on social media. Even smaller business are increasingly turning towards the social sites to expand their businesses as it is one of the most effective medium, not only in terms of the wide public outreach it carries, but also because of its cost efficiency. Social media is something that stands as a must in present world and it is here to stay.

Discussion

Social media means using blogs, video sharing, community sites, photographs or pictures etc. to market products or services. In this regard, there are some important websites such as Face book, LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter that boast of more than 5 million visitors daily. It is because of this large public traffic on these websites that the medium of social media has become one of the most important and successful tool for any business to employ. Social media has gained a lot of prominence among the businesses because it is a low cost investment in contrast to other forms of advertisement and publicity. Social media is basically free to use and can be used to market the same thing that otherwise would cost thousands of dollars if other means are used. The sites on social media are heavily visited daily, and they act like a word-of-mouth idea which seems more acceptable and attractive to the people than it otherwise would feel to them through commercial advertisement (Partridge, 2011).

The increasing popularity of the net among the public has led to the evolving of many social technology tools that have gained immense prominence over the past two decades. There are several tools that exist out which the following are the most important ones.

Facebook

It is a social networking site in which individuals are allowed to create their personal profiles and connect with other users. Users may use the search option to search for family members and friends on this site. People on this site can share pictures, photographs, video clips, web links and other data besides being able to send messages and chat with friends. It also includes a service entitled “news feed” where you can view the updates of the people who are in your friend list. Apart from the various applications it offers, face book hosts multiple advertisements of different companies. At present Facebook has more than 600 million users (Evans, 2010).

Twitter

Twitter is another popular website that is used by millions of users worldwide. It offers a social networking site that allows people to post and view updates from friends, people, communities and organizations. Users may post up to 140 characters as “tweets.” Its use has become popular and many business organizations boast of their tweets being trending worldwide, or of those that are trending ...