Impacts Of Social Media

In order to understand the impact of social media, first of all, we need to understand what social media is. So just let’s get started with this question.

What Is Social Media

Social media is a combination of different activities, which help the users I generating communication, sharing their events, thoughts, and information with each other. It helps in establishing strong relationships between the different parties interacting with each other. The social media is not limited to some of the famous forums which we use daily rather it extends to the blogging forums, wikis and various such media forums, which we use often but might not term them as social media. As a whole, some of the examples of social media include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WeChat, OLX, meetup, Tout, Friendster etc.

All these websites have 100,000,000 of registered users on these websites, despite the differences in the functionalities and features that these websites offer. There are few common points in the social media platform that are shared by nearly all the websites included in this definition. These include the creation of service-oriented pages by the business to promote their products and services in the digital world. Additionally, the data created on these platforms are all created by the users whether it is in the form of texts, pictures, videos or infographics. Once created, the data can keep on spreading from one user to the other and often across the media too.

How Do Users Access Social Media

In order to access social media, the users have to get to their desktops and mobile phones. On the desktops, the browsers can be used for accessing certain application whereas, on mobile phones, specially designed utilities are available to provide the users with access to the particular social media forum. With both these ways of accessing the social media forums, users usually debate, argue, present new information and extract the existing information in various different forms of information. The domains for getting the information are also widespread. On these forums, you can actually get information about anything you want.

Additionally, the communication between the users of social media is not limited to the personal level. Now the users interact with each other, with the companies, the various groups, so overall the dimension of communications have also changed, and this is why these forums allow the business and enterprises to establish their own pages and promote their products and services.

The social media forum has various points of differences too. The users can measure the performance on the social media forums through the reach, view, statistics for gabbing customer attention, interaction, usage, nearness etc. The particular metrics for the measurement of the performance of a specific social media can differ.

Usage Of Facebook

Facebook is used in nearly all the countries of the world with 84% of the US youngsters having active accounts on it and 60% of the youth population of the world using it. Most of these users spend around 2 hours of their daily routines on social media networks including Facebook. Overall, the time spent on social media website is more than any particular type of websites. Additionally, with time the usage is increasing too. In 2012, 66billion minutes were being spent by the US users, which have now reached 121 billion minutes.

Advantages And Disadvantages Of Social Media

Like any particular technology, there can be good and bad gestures associated with social media. The social media websites provide the customers and their users with a forum to create linkage between them. Politicians, companies, NGOs and other such bodies can use these forums for creating public awareness etc. but at the same time, this forum can easily be used for bullying, wandering, online persecution etc.

The linkage created by social media is not at par with the telephone sets or the telegraphs that were used to present in the early days of technology rather it has gone a few steps further by providing the liberty to users to share their personal lives, events and daily routines with the others.

Virality Of The Content

On social media, videos or other types of content can go viral in minutes. If someone likes a post they share it with their friends, the newly shared list of friends share the content with their friends and thus the list goes on, resulting in spreading of a single post to an extent that nearly everyone can have access to it. This concept is quite similar to the concept of spreading viral diseases. The disease is spread through the same phenomenon. Because of the way the content spreads on special media, the same name has been given to the social media posts that spread rapidly.

Use Of Mobile Phones

One of the things that have helped in the higher acceptability of these websites is the progress in technology when it comes to the mobile phone. Now, you can use these applications in mobile phones, which provide the users with easy access and thus more usage of these websites. Now you cannot only access these websites in a handy manner but can generate content and share it in an easy manner too. You have your mobile phones everywhere, which can allow you to take more pictures and even upload them on the spot.

Business Advantages

As discussed earlier as well, it is not for personal interactions only. You can have the business concerns associated with it as well. The business can communicate with their market in a better way and keep them aware as compared to the usage of traditional media.

E-Commerce

One of the new dimensions that have become prominent nowadays is e-commerce. Allowing the customers the products online has become easy and accessible as well. So, this aspect of the business has grown by manifolds and is growing even more.