The Advantages of Social Media for Communication

Discuss about the Social Media for International Conference on Web Intelligence.

The role of social media is becoming crucial day by day as people’s lives all across the world revolve around it only. There is a lot of debate around the positive and negative impact of social media. Communication through computer or tablet or smartphone and interacting with a cyber friend has become a trend now but it is easily weakening the verbal communication skill of an individual. The report will discuss in detail on how social media, as well as networking, is strengthening or weakening the society and the power of communication (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010). 

The Internet has clearly helped in increasing the accessibility and technology is playing a very significant role in it since smartphones, computers and tablets had made it even easier to extract information or connect with people closely. People are also interacting on the routine basis with the help of texting or e-mails (Duggan et al., 2015). The main reason behind it is the modern level explosion in use as well as in the level of popularity, social media has become new kind when people talk about communication from large life events to minute specifications like routine lives. Also, social media has one of the major influence on how people interact within last ten years.

The internet has always a huge impact on lives of the people than before. It is important to understand here that it has become a source of constant entertainment via news, education or entertainment channels for the consumers worldwide. But the biggest innovation on social media became a huge success just ten years ago. Social media websites like Facebook, Twitter and another same kind of services have become the most visited websites in no time. These inventions permit the consumer to rapidly and comfortably share any information personal or otherwise with other consumers and further helping in social level interaction (Kietzmann et al., 2011). The services help via a combination of simple, accessible and high-level intuitive designs which encourage positive social attitude by motivating communication among the group of people from different walks of life.

Social media successfully help in touching almost all aspects of personal as well as professional lives of people. In business, it is not only for marketing or PR purposes but also to encourage conversation and form a community. Marketing and PR have become a very integral part of organizational strategy since it touches all department of a company (Gerbaudo, 2018).

The Use of Social Media in Business and Marketing

With a rise in the development of social media, organizations are now turning into a means of marketing or advertisements since it helps the organization to touch the lives of millions of the consumer on a single platform. This can be done by making company official pages on Facebook and other social media platform where the company get the opportunity to directly interact with the consumer. This also permits the business to comfortably reach the consumers at the time of their doubts or complaints.

It is very crucial to understand here that social media websites consist of a realm of the changes in communication at the current time. Different advances in technology further add to social media transformation in a way that people now can communicate with other people on the daily basis since they are connected with one another in so many ways (Asur and Huberman, 2010). It has also made the chain of communication rapid and more effective. Social media websites like Twitter and Facebook send a reminder on the routine basis of important events like birthdays. Despite picking up the phone and make a phone call in a traditional manner, people now instead go on Facebook and with their friends on social media platforms. This has completely removed the requirement of a phone call or send any greetings to near and dear one.

Websites like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook have also motivated the users to have an online personality. They then also build a network of friends that help in connecting with the worldwide community. Data or information in the current time is shared among various platforms and the parties now interact on a public domain or through a more discrete message personally (Xiang and Gretzel, 2010).

Besides connecting to a network of friends, a user can become the part of groups or communities with a particular motive or interest. On these platforms, a subscriber also discusses so many cases covering those interest. Usually, events are developed where there is an existence of physical meeting. There is a number of groups that also motivate users to provide advice on how people must run as well as engage in a debate which can become a good PR tool for them. They also help in providing a social forum for so many people to communicate with one another and with leaders of the communities (Sunstein, 2018).

There are many other social media websites as well like YouTube that provide an opportunity or a platform to share as well as upload videos. On this platform, users can post or see videos and this platform has become a great success among musicians, film community and invented profession life Influencers in various fields like beauty or lifestyle. There are other social media sites like MySpace and many other that also provided consumers with a platform to post and share videos. These websites easily access so many kinds of videos like sports, music, movies and many more (Lenhart et al., 2010). 

The Disadvantages of Social Media for Communication

There are so many negative impacts of social media as well. People especially youngster are easily becoming a target of cyberbullying and so much of unnecessary exposure or attention. Young people are also utilising the mode of mass communication without even realizing the results. There are cases where so many young people who are getting a victim of depression and the cases of suicides are becoming common as an outcome of social media pressure. The impact was so much so that websites have to create a parental control to make sure that no kind of wrong happens to the specific age group of people (Shirky, 2011). The use of social media usually becomes an outlet for the people where they can post hurtful things as well. 

With the growth of websites in the social media industry, there are so many advantages and disadvantages to the mode of communication can be impacted. The main question is whether the advantages have completely surpassed the drawbacks. It is important to note here that advantages of social media are certainly very beneficial for the world and has influenced the way people communicate. There are some very serious cultural changes in the society where even the prisoners in so many countries can have limited access to social media which allow them to stay updated. The television is also becoming redundant concept since social media websites providing news at a much faster rate than the local news (Couldry, 2012).  This is also increasing the pressure on the organization to stay more updated with world news every second.

Conclusion

The social media certainly helped in improving the communication by continuous development of social media. Everyone from all areas like temples to school now uses social media for communication. Social media has also evolved so much in last ten years and every day reaching some completely new heights. Comfort in access and development make it more advantageous to all people from laymen to top officials (Couldry, 2012). Social media is constantly evolving and so are people. This is why there is a constant improvement in communication which helped in overcoming the negative impacts of social media.

Reference

Asur, S. and Huberman, B.A., 2010, August. Predicting the future with social media. In Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology-Volume 01 (pp. 492-499). IEEE Computer Society.

Couldry, N., 2012. Media, society, world: Social theory and digital media practice. Polity.

Duggan, M., Ellison, N.B., Lampe, C., Lenhart, A. and Madden, M., 2015. Social media update 2014. Pew research centre, 19.

Gerbaudo, P., 2018. Tweets and the streets: Social media and contemporary activism. Pluto Press.

Kaplan, A.M. and Haenlein, M., 2010. Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media. Business horizons, 53(1), pp.59-68.

Kietzmann, J.H., Hermkens, K., McCarthy, I.P. and Silvestre, B.S., 2011. Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media. Business horizons, 54(3), pp.241-251.

Lenhart, A., Purcell, K., Smith, A. and Zickuhr, K., 2010. Social Media & Mobile Internet Use among Teens and Young Adults. Millennials. Pew internet & American life project.

Shirky, C., 2011. The political power of social media: Technology, the public sphere, and political change. Foreign affairs, pp.28-41.

Sunstein, C.R., 2018. # Republic: Divided democracy in the age of social media. Princeton University Press.

Xiang, Z. and Gretzel, U., 2010. Role of social media in online travel information search. Tourism management, 31(2), pp.179-188.