Week 2: Social Media

Last week, I mentioned about how social media has made our daily lives really convenient. In today's Web 2.0, everything is about using social media! From staying in touch with family and friends, news update and even business purposes through various social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and others.

In today's social media era, many of our networks have expended as compared to before. If you are actively on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, you would be able to meet new people all over the world everyday and having such platforms, it makes communication much easier and convenient. In the past, communication between parties were only limited to phone, emails or regular mails. However, thanks to social media, we are able to communicate through public reply, private & group chat, direct message, and hashtag.

Let's take Facebook as an example, we are able to reply strangers or friends through their wall; thus, this is known as public reply, where your reply is made available to other people who had viewed that particular post. Besides public reply, facebook allows us to private chat with a particular person, or create a group chat with various friends you would like to communicate with. Such group chat allows users to share information with selective groups of people.

Let's talk about direct message and hashtag. Direct message and hashtag are often seen in Twitter and Instagram. Direct message allows you to communicate with the person instantly and privately. 

Hashtag helps to organize information on social media, which allows users to locate and access the content easily by just a click. This is something which other media are not able to do so.  It helps users with similar experiences to connect and communicate better than users in general.

Social media also serves as a business solution platform. Many companies these days are going through social media for advertising and promotion for their services and products. And through social media, the responses are much more pleasant as compared to print media. Why do I say so?

First, companies advertising through social media is low in cost, or perhaps, free of charge.

Second, sharing of details of normal print advertisement usually depends on word of mouth from one another. However, with social media, information can now be easily shared to all by using the repost function on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

One good example I would like to share is Starbucks. Starbucks has their own Facebook page, which allows them to stay in touch with their consumers on their promotions and updates at no cost.

And whenever they are having any promotions on their drinks, they will post an advertisement on their facebook page; thus, users who have "liked" their page will be able to see the advertisement on their news feed. 

 

Using Facebook as an advertising platform definitely helped Starbucks to save cost, and the responses generated are in fact better than printing brochures. Because users are able to repost the advertisement on Facebook to inform their friends, or save the image and repost it to Twitter and Instagram with their fingertips! 

Therefore, social media is a very powerful yet convenient tool. The benefits of social media is continuously expanding through time and it has completely transformed our daily lives. Today, social media is no longer just about leisure purposes and sharing of information, it is also our networking platform which is capable of bringing profits for companies.