Assignment on Social Media Relation

Social media has changed how business engage with their customers in recent
years. Many businesses benefit from a closer business relationship. However,
some businesses have been negatively affected by social media. Discuss the
challenges of social media marketing and potential ways to manage it.
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. Social media in general
2. Social media in business
3. Advantages of social media in business
4. Disadvantages of social media in business
Conclusions
Bibliography
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Introduction
Nowadays, marketing has found itself in a case where it is increasingly problematic for
both researchers and practitioners to make clear, unambiguous decisions, indicate
justified directions of changes and transformations (Rzepa and Przybylska-Duda, 2016,
p. 18). Finally, it is increasingly difficult to characterize the contemporary face of
marketing activities.
As the result of spreading the Internet, the process of communication and the
tools used in it on the market have changed as well. Currently, in addition to the traditional
approach, such as advertising campaigns, social media are used as well as a great mean
of sharing information, dealing with customers and providing services all over the world on
an unprecedented scale. Social media is not only cheaper way of reaching the customer,
but their range is much more visible than the others. However, even though it may seem
that there are only advantages of using social media in business, some problems, i.e.
disadvantages may appear as well.
This paper focuses on the presentation of how social media has changed how
business engage with their customers in recent years. The challenges of social media
marketing and potential ways to manage it are presented here as well. The paper begins
with the presentation of social media in general. Then, the portrayal of social media in
business is provided. The next ones are advantages and disadvantages of social media in
business are presented and discussed. It can be noticed that many businesses have
benefited from a closer business relationship. Still, as aforementioned, some of them have
been negatively affected by social media.
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1. Social media in general
Generally, social media can be defined as solutions using the Internet and mobile
technologies, which enables communication through interactive dialogue (Wells 2008). It
can also be described as a group of web-based applications, which are made on the basis
on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2. This results in the ability of
creating and exchanging user-generated content (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010, pp. 59-60).
There is also a more precise definition of this phenomenon is presented by Flew (2007) in
the following words:
Social media is a new driver of the convergent media sector. The term social
media refers to technologies, platforms, and services that enable individuals to
engage in communication from one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many
(Encyclopedia Britannica, 2021).
Social media includes websites that are used to build social networks and social
relations. These relations are based on similar hobbies, interests, common private or
professional life and many more issues (Obar and Wildman, 2015, p. 750). The variety of
social networking sites available on the Internet nowadays are difficult to be precisely
determined with a single definition. Still, there are some common features, namely social
media based on using web applications, users create their own profiles, the user-
generated content is significant here, and the facilitation of social networking (Kaplan and
Haenlein, 2009, pp. 59–60). The latter one means that social media facilitate the
development of online social networks by linking the user's profile with other people or
entities with similar interests or to some extent related to them. Thus, it can be claimed
that social media is the media that human being interact with using an extensive set of
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communication tools (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2009, p. 61).
An interesting fact is that social media, similarly to traditional media, use the
message based on several matters, such as writing, image or sound in a completely new
space, called virtual, which means that this message is sent via the Internet. It can be
noticed that the main difference between traditional media and social media is the
interactivity of users of the latter one as well as the users’ possibility to publish their
content almost instantly (Shu et al., 2017).
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