Impact Of Social Media On Society

Over the past decade, there has been a considerable debate about the effect of social media on individuals and societies. In fact, social media has become inseparable part of our life. It is not a new thing and has various forms. It emerged in the late seventies and the early eighties with the emergence of USENET, Bulletin Board System, AOL. In around 1994, private internet service providers came with new technology revolution in the major cities of the USA. This gave a golden chance to the millions of people to come online and gave them the access to the internet. This era was the dawn of the social media. This gave birth to various online social sites like classmate.com, P2P, Napster, Sixdegree, Friendster, Myspace, LinkendIn, etc. There

It has changed our lifestyle to a greater extent. Just imagine of the older times, when one had to send a message by a mailing letter. It took a long time to reach the message. And just remember about the high calling rates of long distance calls before social media. But with the emergence of social media technology, one can convey the information to the any part of the world within fraction of seconds. It is like a magic band full of miracles. Another benefit of the social media is that anybody can express himself online. Anybody can make their own videos of their talents and extra abilities and post online and get popularity. For example, a 13 year old Compton skateboarder, Steven Fernandez became famous by just putting his skating board stunts videos online on youtube. This helps him to get corporate sponsorship and made him a walking billboard. Now he is making good money (Generation Like). Thus we can say that social media helps a lot to display one’s talent to the whole

One of the most important things to point out the impact of social networks in the business field is e-commerce. In older times companies project their advertisements either on the television or in newspapers or billboards. It was just an one way communication, which did not yield attractive returns from the consumers. But now companies use social media platforms as a two-way communication medium. For instance, we can see in documentary movie “Generation Like”. Companies are now turning the Facebook ‘Likes’ into the good money. ‘Likes’ button on the Facebook has a great importance. More the likes you have more the value you gain. When one like something online, a product, a brand or a celebrity it becomes part of the identity that they broadcast to the world in free. Companies are getting free advertisers in the form of their consumers (Generation Like). Social media profile information is really valuable to the advertisers for the promotion of their product. This help the companies in market research. Some companies tend to outsource their social media asset management to their advertising partners. By acting social networks as stepping stones, social media marketing can gain a lot of benefits including relationship building, brand building, publicity, promotions and so on. So, it can be concluded that social media marketing proposes several opportunities for entrepreneurs, small businesses, midsize companies and huge