As our day on Earth advances, so does the technology we use. From the birth of the first computer in 1822, to the implementation of internet in 1969. Ever since the internet became popular, it changed the way of how people communicate in their daily lives. The internet is vastly used ever since, one of the most outstanding use of the internet is the social media.
You might recognize the vastly used term of social media, but the origins of social media might surprise you. Here is a brief time line down below or, click here to see a video explanation of social media by ShoutOut Digital
- 1997: first introduced blogging.
- 1999: Friends reunited was made public.
- 2002: introduced Friendster.
- 2003: Myspace was announced to the public as well as introducing other forms of social media such as pod cast for broadcasting, flickr for sharing images and Linkedin for sharing confidential documents for work environment.
- 2004: launched Facebook.
- 2005: started bebo (blog early blog often) and YouTube gained more publicity.
- 2006: launched Twitter.
- 2009: the fall of many less popular websites such as bebo, Friendster and myspace
- 2009 onward: a lot of new and different forms of social media has been added such as Instagram and vines.
Now you know a bit about the timeline of social media, let’s talk about what social media really is.
Social media is meant to be a set of electronic tools that augment our ability to communicate, cooperate, collaborate and connect with others in the world. Is this not what you think social media is? Don’t worry, you aren’t wrong, it’s just that the social media uses are so broad that there is many ways of interpenetrating it.
Since there are so many people who uses social media, let’s take a look at how businesses can use utilize it.
Businesses can utilize social media as an asset, these are some ways that a business can profit from social media:
- Fast information exchange rate
- Cheaper to advertise new products or services
- Easy to collect information from visitors/ potential customers
- Attract more attention
those are just the some of many benefits of using social media for a business scenario. This is good news for small business and Non-profit organization because of the reasonably low maintenance requirements it needs.It is also possible for small business to gain more popularity for their goods and services provided, you know to become a big independent business.
With all these benefits nothing can go wrong right? Well there are some down sides of social media for business, here are some point that shows the bad side of social media for business:
- Risk of negative feedback from the public
- It needs to have good fresh ideas constantly to keep people interested
- It needs monitoring on a regular basis
- There might be inappropriate users on you site, such as cyber bullying and the internet trolls
So in the end should small business and non-profit business take the gamble of using social media to promote themselves? I suppose that they would need to be a lot of planning before the next step is taken. In the mean time see if you can think of how social media have changed your lives, and would that change your opinions on social media?
Cheers for taking your time reading
socialblog2016 