The Importance Of Social Media In Society Today?

Before we get into the impact of social media, let’s first understand what social media is and why it should be such an important platform for organizations today to be included in all their strategies and communications.

Social media definition: Social media is a virtual set of computer mediated tools where people can share, comment, create, exchange and interact through their common interests. It could be on a personal or on a career level. Social media is also defined as a group of internet based a web application tool that builds on ideological and technological foundations of web 2.0 allowing the creation and exchange of user generated tools

Why is social media so important today?

Just as how the advent of TV changed the way we just

Having a website alone isn’t enough for your business. Your digital space should be extended beyond a mere website to social sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc and capitalize on it or better risk falling behind competition. Another way of looking at the same is that in these times there isn’t a company who do not have their brand’s social media assets and if they do they will soon adopt them and that’s the power of social media.

Social media users today are not just our target customers; they are also our brand custodians. They carry our brand’s message and experiences forward through their social circles. What they like, dislike, love, hate and share the relation with our brand are seen as comments, videos, blogs, likes, shares, tweets, hastags, forward etc and this can spread like wild fire. If the experiences are good, the brand is the hero and if the same are termed bad experiences, it might be the end of the brand’s life itself.

Adopting social media and devising the overall strategies around it is not considered cool anymore. Infact, it is one of the basic

it may be a short term or even a long term depending on how trivial or big the issue becomes. Even the biggest of brands have faced backlashes for their ignorance to issues that they have not resolved or even tried to attempt during the initial stages of the problems.

There are many examples one can quote.

In the fateful year of July’13 a Boeing 777 crash landed at San Francisco Int’l Airport from Seoul, South Korea. Visitors/ passengers who were waiting for their flights saw the incident and started capturing the fateful incident through their smart phones and they started sharing the same online and within minutes the conversation spread like wild fire. There were 44,000 tweets on the same depicting images of survivors as they escaped from the wreckage.

With the burst of social media in the last decade, it has vastly complicated the challenges faced by communication professionals.

First one being, people are so actively suing social media platforms that the numbers are fast on the rise to some 2 Bn... these people are called as “Citizen