Social Media - The "In" thing?

For a week, I've been learning about social media and the power shift from COM 125 lecture. This idea of social media intrigues me and I find it new and fascinating, because to be honest, I do not have any of these social networking accounts. I was wondering just how much do others know about social media, so I went around asking my friends, and it seemed as though their idea of social media is basically just Facebook, Friendster, MySpace, and Twitter. It leaves me wondering, is social media just simply a fad? Friendster have fell to oblivion with the rise of Facebook and many more sites. Thus, is it true that all similar sites will just come and go, grow and dissolve in time to come?




Personally, although I do not indulge myself in the wonders of these social networking sites, I admit that social media indeed do have a great impact on individuals and it is a revolution of Internet technology. It is a great platform for people to share infomation, opinions and insights with each other. It is becoming a very important part of people's lives and I believe that social media as a whole will eventually grow to a stage that it encompasses ones daily interactions. Looking from this point of view, social media is hardly a fad that will face out as time past.

Social media tools have increasingly been used for small to large sized businesses. It is a novel makreting strategy and trend as it allows business people to meet with a vast number of individuals across the globe. One can also easily create a network of renowned people in their industry to expand their professional and personal horizons. By sharing quality content, the site traffic will be increased and this naturally results in increased publicity, exposure, recognition and eventually profit. On a side note, it is also vital for a business to know what their customers are saying online about them in order to survive.

Aforementioned, the use of social media tools aids in publicity. That means advertising! And best of all, certain social media tools are available to everyone free, if not for a minimal cost. There is no other low cost promotional method out there that can easily bring about a large number of visitors, some of whom will become regular ones, visiting the website over and over again. By creating excellent content and posting links to ones company's site, instantly, one can see the results of the primary and secondary traffic. Primary traffic of which refers to visitors who directly come from social media sites, whilst secondary traffic refers to referral traffic from links of other sites.

See how the benefits often exceed the cost. The greatest cost is possibly limited to only time. However, once armed with the skills of the social media tools, one will see that the web traffic generated from social communitites surpass any kinds of traffic an individual can ever receive from search engines. While it is difficult to increase the search engine traffic, social media traffic can easily be controlled and raised. This in itself can already be a prominent reason as to why business people should join the whole social media ecosystem.

Convinced that social media can be useful for your business? If you are not, one last thing to consider. Why waste the money to buy thousand of links and spaces for advertisement, when one can easily create a social community and get equal or even greater amount of traffic through the use of social media for free? It is as straightforward as it sounds. Focus on creating just one excellent site via the social media tools and publicity will come rolling in for you. And before you know it, the profits come rolling in as well.