Project objective

The concept of social media can be a very crucial tool for the businesses in the current time since it brings benefits to the engagement of the audience and increasing the overall traffic of the website. But there can also be certain drawback which consists of resources needed and negative feedback. Based on the pros and cons can assist people in determining the best approach towards social media for the business. Presence of social media has basically transformed the way business is done or communicated to the consumers and the people at large (Borgatti et al., 2018). The important factor is to highlight on how social media can work on improving marketing and customer service. The report discusses about the research methods with positive and the negative factors of handling social media in organisations.

The main objective of the report is to understand the impact of social media on the businesses in the current time. This will be explained by analysing advantages as well as disadvantages of social media on business.

Social media, unlike other kinds of marketing, where marketers can retain some level of control in the area of messaging in addition to there is no form of control on the social media. There are a number of platforms like Twitter and Facebook that permit anyone as well as everyone to come forward and actually share their views. (Bryman and Bell, 2015).

The social media works on assuring a proper improvement in the centric approach with handling the negativity that could impact the organisation as well. It is, therefore, become very crucial to constantly supervise the social media account to make sure that the business always looks in right picture. It is important for the business to create to make an effort and create positive content about the business that will rate highly in the search engines so that consumer can always get to see the best side (Bryman, 2015). Following are the benefits of the business of effective use of social media are discussed in detail below: –

1. Brand awareness: relevant and compelling data that can grab the attention of many potential consumers and raise the visibility of brands
2. There are so many kinds of compelling and crucial content that can get the attention of many prospective consumers and raise the overall brand visibility.
3. Brand reputation: people can answer in an instant to the growth of the industry can be visible as leaders who have taken some efforts in the field. This further can help in improving the business and how it is seen by the market.
4. Cost effective process. The process of social media can be very cheap in terms of cost than any other conventional advertising as well as promotion functions. The overall cost of maintaining the presence of social media is minimum. When people select or decide to invest in paid level advertising, one needs to spend as much or as little as the budget permits (Buettner, 2016).
5. Website traffic benefits. Impactful social content can help in boosting the overall traffic on the website. This further can lead to rising online customers like sales as well as leads.
6. Evaluation: it is simple to calculate how a website traffic can get from the social media. One can also establish tracking to decide how sales are normally generated through paid advertising on social media.
7. Customer conversation: businesses can now offer an improved level of customer service and answer in an effective manner to all forms of feedback. When there is positive feedback which is in public space and can also be very persuasive many other prospective consumers (Burns, 2016). There is negative feedback as well as which throws light on areas where the business can take efforts to improve.

When businesses try to promote their product, social media can be an immense help. The important thing to note is that the current and prospective consumers are already in the market space. Facebook along has users which are more than one billion on a routine basis and therefore there can be the usage of more than one platform for advertising.

Project scope

The number of the audience which can be targeted on social media is huge. Apart from Facebook, Twitter too has more than three hundred million active users every month. Then there is Instagram with approx. five hundred million users and many more. Though businesses don’t require to use every possible platform available, developing an account on just one or two can provide people with much-needed exposure to so many people all across the world (Cook, 2017).

Another most distinct benefit of social media is the capacity to get some assistance from the number of followers. The important thing to understand is that people actually love immensely to share things about their life on the network and this can be used for the research.

The disadvantage of social media

Following is the detailed discussion of some drawback of using social media: –

1. Resources: people will have to commit to the resources in order to manage the social media presence while answering to the feedback and also producing the new form of content. This consist of hiring as well as training the staff members, with an investment as a process of paid advertising and also paying for the cost to create content in the form of video or image content (Dubos, 2017).
2. Review: it is simple to properly quantify the process of return on investment which is related to online sales created with the help of social media advertising and there is some less form of tangible advantages. In addition, it can also be very hard to calculate and use a monetary value on the basis of awareness of brand and reputation that social media can bring. It is also challenging to understand how social media can impact the sales in-stores (Eriksson and Kovalainen, 2015).
3. Ineffective level of usage: the presence of social can used in an ineffective manner. For instance, usage of the network to further push the drive to sell without any form of engagement with consumers or completely failing to answers to a negative feedback may further harm the reputation.

There are so many advantages and disadvantages of using social media from the business point of view. Moreover, with rising in the overall reach of the brand, social media also permit the company to enhance the overall brand loyalty. Also, there is a number of studies that show the large percentage of people follow the brand on social media and they are more likely to stay loyal to different brands.

Social media can also be used to gain effective or valuable data about the consumers that can assist to ensure smart business decisions. For instance, social listening permits people to actually discover how people actually perceive the brand as well as the company (Hair Jr et al., 2015). Social listening can further uncover the interaction related to business as well as also answer questions about the offerings.

There are some negative points also as discussed above. The users of social media have the freedom to express in which way they want. This further means that all the customers which are satisfied can leave good reviews on the page, however, they can also leave a bad and angry comment about the business.

Also, it is very simple to get actually get caught in social media and further post things which can be bad for the company and which further can lead to bad results negatively affecting the business. For so many organization that entertains the large audience, errors are bound to happen and it will not go unnoticed. This all can happen in the matter of few minutes and all because of social media and its users who are very quick in reacting and also have the tendency to share the content which is all over the important media places in some time only (He et al.,2015).

Literature review

In addition, it takes time as well as hard work to be able to maintain as well as have an interactive social media presence. When a small group of people with the restricted resource, it becomes challenging to commit or dedicate the required resources to social media. Companies will have to supervise every platform, answer questions and feedback as well as post right content. There are some people who can view this as a disadvantage, giving time to social media can further assist people or business to develop a lasting association with consumers that will keep returning for so many years.

Primary question

What are the advantages and disadvantages of social media usage on the businesses in the 21^st century?

Secondary questions

1. How can social media be used in right manner for effective outcomes for the business?
2. How can drawback take the company into a lot of trouble if not managed in the right manner?

Qualitative research 

Particularly, including qualitative features based on data collection will ensure to gain clarity on complicated nature of the features that can be studied and therefore more understanding. Thus, the accounting procedure consists of many human approaches which are mixed with relevant research that can help in gaining a clarity of the nature od use of social media information. The qualitative research will thus be utilised in the form of a detailed questionnaire which consists of open-ended and close-ended queries (Luo and Zhong, 2015).

Quantitative research 

To implement quantitative methods, a well-structured interview can help in conducting the business with the same number of applicants through various mediums like phone or face to face. This will make sure that every interview consists of a similar set of queries. The important thing is that there will be a comparison that exists between different kinds of social media platforms and will further make it simple.

Sample size

This case will cover all form of people that are using social media will be part of the study. This can further be done to make sure that the opinion based on social media marketing in a number of the financial institutes will cover a detailed description of all ages. Moreover, there are many users that can be interviewed just to know their possible reactions and opinion based on social media usage (Prpi? et al., 2015). After recognising the population, it further becomes crucial for the researcher to actually draw a sample from the actual population. This sample can work as a representative of an overall population that can further be interpreted on the basis of studying the population.

Sampling

The study will cover simple but random sampling methods that can be used as a process of interviews responses, answer the questions and evaluate all form of hypotheses. The pilot study will have conducted that will help in understanding the overall effectiveness of data collection technique right before the main study.

Research questions

Variables

The variables of the research can be categorised as dependent where the research is actually taking interest and independent where it impacts many dependent elements. The important thing to understand is that dependent elements consist of age and gender of the respondents (Sekaran and Bougie, 2016). There also exist many independent elements that will consist of the nature of a business, whether they utilise the standard which is common, level of impact of the study, nature of the business.

Data collection

While selecting the sample for the study, kind of informed level consent is sent to many studies the candidates through hand delivery or electronically handling it. The main motive of the study can be explained to candidates and response will be further be promised as a part of confidential data and compiled at one place with an opinion of other participants to make a common conclusion with a list of recommendations.

Data analysis

The answer accomplished from the questionnaire will be part of excel, coded as well as edited in right manner. The data can also be exported into so many version of data analysis software, evaluated and presented by using a descriptive form of statistics like means, mode-based percentage and standard deviations (Turban et al., 2015).

Expected outcome/conclusion

In the current world, there is no form of business which is without any kind of communication. Too many managers and business owners in the present time, social media usage is treated as the next most effective things. The overall emergence of many online technologies that permits in reaching the effective crowd without mainly meeting then has shown an important but temporary fad that can be used properly while it is still in trend (Turban et al., 2017). The group of entrepreneurs, reaching towards the virtual market has presented as the main step, not to settle the brand, however, also earning acceptance in the current market. There are people who have also gone ahead to settle online shops where the consumer can comfortably order as well as wait for the products to be offered without any important visit to the product stores.

Reliability and validity

The usage of mixed methodologies in research is based on threats towards reliability and validity of the obtained outcome. For the sake of primary research, a test for the sake of validity and reliability can be conducted to get whether the same outcome can further be reproducible. But, for secondary data, there can no requirement to carry out any test since the data will already be part of publication as well as signed as information is passed on social media to business (Turban et al., 2017).

Research limitation

There is a number of restrictions on the current methodology in the present research and it can be defined as the long-term or effort needed. In addition, the research also needs many resources to collect a lot of data in order to respond to the current set-out research-based questions (Turban et al., 2017). There are many sources of data that can be answered to gain more confidence with the help of research findings and there are chances that some data can be obtained and cannot be very collaborative and therefore could be an option and there can discrepancy in outcomes.

References

Borgatti, S.P., Everett, M.G. and Johnson, J.C., 2018. Analyzing social networks. Sage.

Bryman, A. and Bell, E., 2015. Business research methods. Oxford University Press, USA.

Bryman, A., 2015. Social research methods. Oxford university press.

Buettner, R., 2016, January. Getting a job via career-oriented social networking sites: The weakness of ties. In System Sciences (HICSS), 2016 49th Hawaii International Conference on (pp. 2156-2165). IEEE.

Burns, P., 2016. Entrepreneurship and small business. Palgrave Macmillan Limited.

Cook, N., 2017. Enterprise 2.0: How social software will change the future of work. Routledge.

Dubos, R., 2017. Social capital: Theory and research. Routledge.

Eriksson, P. and Kovalainen, A., 2015. Qualitative methods in business research: A practical guide to social research. Sage.

Hair Jr, J.F., Wolfinbarger, M., Money, A.H., Samuel, P. and Page, M.J., 2015. Essentials of business research methods. Routledge.

He, W., Wu, H., Yan, G., Akula, V. and Shen, J., 2015. A novel social media competitive analytics framework with sentiment benchmarks. Information & Management, 52(7), pp.801-812.

Luo, Q. and Zhong, D., 2015. Using social network analysis to explain communication characteristics of travel-related electronic word-of-mouth on social networking sites. Tourism Management, 46, pp.274-282.

Prpi?, J., Shukla, P.P., Kietzmann, J.H. and McCarthy, I.P., 2015. How to work a crowd: Developing crowd capital through crowdsourcing. Business Horizons, 58(1), pp.77-85.

Sekaran, U. and Bougie, R., 2016. Research methods for business: A skill building approach. John Wiley & Sons.

Turban, E., King, D., Lee, J.K., Liang, T.P. and Turban, D.C., 2015. Electronic commerce: A managerial and social networks perspective. Springer.

Turban, E., Outland, J., King, D., Lee, J.K., Liang, T.P. and Turban, D.C., 2017. Electronic Commerce 2018: A Managerial and Social Networks Perspective. Springer