Social media has completely revolutionised how people communicate with each other. Nowadays, connecting is just a click away. It has now become an integral part of life to the point that we can hardly survive without social media (Taylor 2013, p.7). While social media is still at its infant stages, it gives all indications that it will continue to make improvements on how we communicate and do business for many years to come. Previously, only Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn dominated both the social and business network media, but lately, hundreds of more social networks have emerged and are quickly gaining favour with its users. Some of these social networks include sites such as whatsapp, Snapchat, palmchat among many other network sites.
Unlike Facebook, these emerging social media sites such as SNAP CHAT and Whatsapp they have been specifically remodelled for mobile phone users. They enable small business owners either send the pictures of the products that they are selling at an improved urgency. Specifically, Snap chat has greatly improved many businesses especially that when the target audience lies between 13-25 years of age. To further expound on how Snapchat works, a snap or a picture becomes available to the user for a certain set of time between 1 to 10 seconds once the user logs in. Nonetheless, the story part about the picture will make that particular item be up for not more than 24 hours. Therefore, the idea of a limited lifespan makes Snapchat the best avenue to deliver a call to action that creates a sense of urgency and excitement (Anand, 2010, p.133).
Numerous business organisations have started to embrace the idea of using social network such Snapchat as an advertising channel. According to an article authored for Snapchat, it reports that Snapchat logs out over 400million messages every day (Meeker& Wu 12), therefore, creative marketers can tap onto this niche through marketing strategies such as rewarding their customers with mobile coupons. Additionally, the companies can gain followers with various giveaway. For instance, a frozen Yoghurt store chain by the name 16Handles, was reported having improved on their sales through Snapchat by sending discount coupons to their followers who sent them the pictures/Snaps of their friends eating the companies frozen yoghurt. These coupons would range from 10% to 100% discount recipients which would be redeemed by presenting the coupon to the cashier.
Apart from advertising, many business organisation can also capitalise on social media especially LinkedIn, Facebook and twitter as a way of recruiting its workers. In fact, I find it being a perfect way of recruiting their workers since the recruiting officer might get an overview of the person they want to hire in regard to how they carry themselves or behave in public when they are not under the watch of their supervisors. They can post various job positions to their sites after which the interested persons can later apply for these posts or by following the laid down procedures as explained by the recruiting company (Bondarouk, 2013). Nonetheless, not all the companies have adopted the strategy of hiring its works through social media networking, these include big multinational corporations such as banks. They tend to shy away from recruiting their workers through the use of social media since they perceive it to being a less official strategy. In conclusion, it is evident that social media will ultimately compel all the organisations to embrace it as a way of communicating to the outside world, since most of the people nowadays spend the better part of their day in social media.
Points for presentation purposes
- Social media has completely revolutionised how people communicate
- People nowadays spend the biggest part of their day socialising in social media, therefore business organisation can take advantage of this trend to improve on their sales or operations
- There have been emerging social media networks that are posing great competition to the dominant networks such as Facebook, twitter and LinkedIn. These networks include, Snapchat, What Sapp, Instagram and Palmchat.
- Social media is a perfect way to market products
- Social media provides a cheap way to market products and services to an infinite target audience.
- Some companies also use social media as a way of recruiting their employees
References
Anand, R. (2010). Recruiting with Social Media: Social Media's Impact on Recruitment and
HR. Pearson Education.
Bondarouk, t., & olivas-lujan, m. R. (2013). Social media in human resources management.
Bingley, U.K., Emerald. http://www.emeraldinsight.com/1877-6361/12.
Meeker, M., & Wu, L. INTERNET TRENDS D11 CONFERENCE.
Taylor, E. (2013). Simplify social media for recruiting: a step-by -step handbook for
implementing social media. [S.l.], Iuniverse Com.
