Social Media: Outreach 2k16

The life which we are living is quite different from the one which was lived by our forefathers. The way we think, talk, interact, plan our day and communicate with others is different from what our ancestors did. Long gone are the days when people used to gather at night in open spaces, around fire to share their experiences from their day. Thanks to social media communication has become more feasible and less time consuming. Now we can share our very own information with anyone at any time within minutes.

While social media sites are known for personal information of people regarding, habits, mood swings, the places they visit or the food they eat; the scope of social Media is much more than that. Students and faculty can use it to increase their collaborations in terms of assignments, team projects, content sharing, discussions; brands and businesses can increase their visibility; latest news can be shared; learning opportunities via different tutorials; arrangement of meetings can easily be done though social media.

Social media urges/ provides the opportunity to business/ brands to increase their visibility by advertising on different forums at the same time in the cheapest possible way. Business personals can build relationships with their potential customers by communication and understanding their demands. Moreover, the overall waste generation and resource management context is also maintained in a cost effective way.

Social media has numerous benefits among which the topmost is assistance in business. Business on social media is all about how companies interact with their potential buyers and attract masses by achieving significant increase in their sales. In this digital age, social media plays an essential role in now customers search, discover, share information and give feedback about brands and related products.  Online reputation and representation has gained a lot importance, resulting in a direct impact on the customer. It is estimated that more than 3 quarters of the buyers search for a company before actually buying something. 78% of the new business/ entrepreneurs use social media to attract new customers. (Gurus, 2016) They form their decision after considering activity on social media and customer reviews. Social media is easy to user friendly, cost-effective and highly efficient medium to correspond with the customer.

Advertisement campaigns are also an essential part of business through social media. Facebook has played the most important role in this sector in a sense that anyone, owing a page, can create an advertisement for their products and respective offers and post which will be readily shared at a low expense. Facebook also provides entrepreneurs the facility to promote their business by making business pages and linking them to their social market and sales groups. They have also started to provide a proper show case to the pages in order to properly display their products. 

Social media also plays a very important role in education. Millions of research articles, on-going projects, latest discoveries and technological advancements are shared on social media daily. It helps the students and the facilitators to share their work and progress with each other. Many groups and pages are now providing linguistics facility to the learners. Researches can be conducted and sample size can be sufficiently increased by the use of this medium. Survey sites like Google+ offer many analytical tools to display the results (charts, graphs, etc.).

Distraction from the target is the first problem being faced by Social Media users. Usually people working on social media end up in sharing inappropriate/ insignificant content. This is one of the reasons that most of the organizations (educational institutes and offices) do not allow access to these website through their servers.

Unlike other organizations, Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) which is an independent think tank Society of Pakistan, do not feel insecure from the challenges being faced in the context of distractions. They use social media as the basic tool to communicate with common folks and trust their employs in regards to the usage of social media. Online seminars/ video conferencing, official page on major networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram), hashtags etc. are common culture in this organizations. They easily share their research and get the feedback which is later on, considered while increasing the scope of the research themes.

So the question is “how can we fully benefit/ get maximum benefit from social media? The key to success on social media is creation of engaging material that will go viral instantly. This may not happen every time; yet the user will get the fair idea of what to do and what not to do with the passage of time.

 This generation is lucky enough to have a powerful, affordable and massive marketing forum like social media to connect with the people all around the world. Whether it is to keep a check on competitors in business or get news alerts of on-going events; social media provides us the opportunity to explore massive data portals in short time.