With substantial internet penetration and the explosion of
internet-enabled devices, social media has become a part of our daily lives
more than ever. The genesis of social media has been conceived in the pre-internet
era with the primary purpose of transmitting messages across the network.
Social-media got its real shape post the invention of the internet when Digital
communication saw its growing importance. Social media in a way has tapped in
the strong human urge of interacting with people and has largely fulfilled
their social needs. We have witnessed a gradual but ground-breaking evolution
from the electronic information exchange age to today’s digital transformation
world.
In the initial stages of the internet’s growth, we have witnessed
applications facilitating email communications, online chatting, and other
broadcast messaging platforms, post which, blogging and dating sites started
gaining popularity which garnered a lot of traction in this digital
communication space. The number of users going online saw a sudden spike and a
whole virtual world came into existence. With an increasing server load,
technologies evolved to cater to such problems. Various business applications
began to gather steam to fulfill other needs & aspirations of people.
LinkedIn spawned thereafter for career-minded professionals. The wide spectrum
of services it provides attracted a lot of users gaining a dominant position in
this space. While this application gathered people on a professional front,
Facebook gained its monopoly in the personal social networking domain by
stimulating people’s social needs. The exponential growth in social media users
can be testified by the fact that 72% of adults use some form of social media
today from a mere 5% in 2005. With this surge in online users & the kind of
different apps taking their shape in this domain, there are various ways in
which users can use them to their advantage. A few of the essential ones I have
listed below:
Online business: With
the advent of social media, the way businesses were done has changed
dramatically. Social media presents multiple opportunities for businesses to
leverage upon. Businesses use these apps to create awareness & engage users
with their brands. Digital marketing has become one of the most important
marketing strategies. Even startups & entrepreneurs leverage these
platforms to build their brands and can get access to the large pool of online
users as their target market. On the consumer side, even they are more vigilant
about the brands they want themselves to associate with, and what better than
social media apps to gather the needed details. As per one of the surveys, 83%
of the consumers want their brands to stay responsive on social media. Customer
forums are created to gather and analyze their reviews and feedback about the
products they launch in the market. Reaching out to a larger audience without
much capital investment & inconvenience, businesses can improve their
visibility and manage their brands efficiently and strategically.
Jobs & Career:
The tedious way of the traditional job-search process has become a relic of the
past. People have now adopted the online mode of searching for their next
opportunity and their benefits are immense. Besides the job portals, they can
leverage social media like LinkedIn in this regard. Getting a new job is all
about having great professional networking, referrals & testimonies of
colleagues who worked with you, showcasing your online profile to the maximum
recruiters possible and who better than LinkedIn makes all these possible.
Advanced algorithms today also help you give your job match score which
indicates the extent to which your profile matches the job requirements. Even
company recruiters actively leverage these apps to post their jobs and look out
for suitable candidates. You can build professional relationships with anyone
from any organization and can build careers seeking advice from a veteran of
their same field. Freelance & other part-time jobs or any other form of
passive income can also be possible through these connections.
Forming personal
relationships: The primary purpose of social media apps is to connect
people from distant places having similar interests. Given the hectic schedule
we are occupied with, these apps help us stay connected with a distant friend
or an acquaintance. Apps like Facebook, Instagram, are built primarily on this
principle. They share their long-lasting memories in form of photos/videos to
bring smiles to their faces even without their physical presence. Recently,
Facebook surpassed 1 billion registered accounts and the count of active users
per month has reached around 2.5 billion. Groups of people having similar
interests can be formed to facilitate sharing of more content in a lesser
amount of time.
While we look at its pros and look to leverage them to benefit us, we
cannot overlook the other side of it. There is a downside to everything and
social media apps are no different. Given it is a virtual world and connections
can form between anyone, we need to be cautious when revealing our personal
data to avoid any sort of misuse. By embedding certain advanced technologies
like Google Analytics, SEOs, AI, ML, the social media apps supply information
to the businesses to form their target audience. While security has become a
grave concern today, as the data is being used for marketing or any other
purposes, I believe the apps have reasonably managed to maintain a certain
level of security, given the data explosion that happens today. To conclude,
the gap between virtual and physical has been bridged by these apps for all
these years and in this hyper-connected world, social media needs to be
harnessed to its potential to cater to our needs, passion and interests to fulfill
our dreams and achieve our goals.
Thanks a lot for reading and feel free to comment.
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