Analyzing the Impact of Social Media on Modern Business Communication

This essay explores the significant impact of social media on contemporary business communication, highlighting its role in transforming how businesses operate and interact with customers. It discusses how social media platforms facilitate cost savings, improve customer communication, and enhance target customer selection through loyalty and reviews. The essay details the benefits of using social media for business, including creating connections with customers, enabling effective campaigning, building a positive brand image, and providing 24/7 availability. It also emphasizes the importance of earned social media and the shift from traditional communication methods. The essay further examines the influence of social media on advertising, reduced advertising costs, targeted reach, original performance evaluation, and enhanced brand awareness. While acknowledging the positive aspects, it also addresses challenges such as developing a social media strategy, understanding return on investment, and selecting appropriate platforms. Statistical data is presented to underscore the growing importance of social media in the business environment.

Running head: IMPACT OF SOCIAL MEDIA
Impact of social media
Name of the student:
Name of the university:
Author note

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Introduction
Social media, also known as the new media, consists of websites and applications to
allow the users to generate and share contentment by social networking. This particular media is
mainly mediated with the use of computer technologies and mobile smart phones. The idea or
concept is created and shared among the virtual communities. Social media forms an important
part of business communication. It permits the users to take part in any event, provide feedback,
get information and allow sharing of mutual ideas (Agnihotri et al. 2016). In a business
organization, social media helps in cost savings, make customer communication better and
enhance the selection of target customers by creating loyalty and reviews. This essay will deal
with the role played by social media in contemporary business communication. It will highlight
the impact of social media in the contemporary business operation.
Description
The business operating all over the world is dependent on the use of social media for
effective communication. Use of modern technologies is responsible for creating a drastic
change in the sphere of business communication. The intention behind using advanced
technology is to maintain effective communication with the customers by using any kind of
device. Initially social media was not created for business use but its increasing popularity
among the people resulted in making it a huge platform for marketing and communication. The
businesspersons have the opportunity to advertise their products and services on the social media
networking sites. Apart from that, it paves the way for the companies to keep in touch with the
customers by using this platform (Ashley and Tuten 2015). Following are the benefits of using
social media for business purpose:

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 Create connection: Social media not only helps the companies in providing information
about certain products and services but also acts as bridge to connect with the customers.
The aim of social media is to focus on involving with the customers much more than
selling the particular product or services (Chang, Yu and Lu 2015). For instance, there
are certain companies who show much interest in flaunting their personal pets rather than
displaying the low cost of products. On the other hand, there are companies who use
social media as a platform to display their corporate social responsibility in the form of
charity, social issue and saving the environment and natural resources.
 Campaigning by the company: social media acts as a personal network to broadcast about
own products and services without any additional investment on the primitive form of
advertising. Previously the customers had to rely on the displaying of advertisement
either in the broadcasting or in the print or outdoor media. However, the companies can
now reach their potential target customers easily with a click. On the other hand, it has
become easy for the customers to share feedback on the selected products and services.
Earlier, they had to wait for a long time to share their opinion on a business transaction.
This advancement has given scope to the company to react immediately according to the
feedback of the customers. It has become easy for them to recognize an admiring
comment or address any issue related to their products and services to avoid future
controversy (Dahnil et al. 2014).
 Image building: The companies get a human appearance by connecting with the people
on the social media platform. There are some companies that permit the employees to
write a blog or post something on behalf of the company to increase their like and
appreciation between the potential customers as well as the existing one. In the

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contemporary business environment, there is no option to keep a veil of goodness on the
image of the company because the customers; review rating reveal it all in front of the
target customers. It helps in trust building and reaching out to the potential customers
with similar interests (Godey et al. 2016).
 Available always: The social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are available
for 24 hours and the business is never shut down. People are growing an affinity towards
using these channels because they are responsible for addressing any issue on their own
at their best possible time. They often reply at an instant and the customers are satisfied
with the resolution of their problem at their availability (Hassan, Nadzim and Shiratuddin
2015).
Another form of social networking is earned social media where there are strategies to lead
people in sharing information among each other. The leading is necessary, as it is not sufficient
to use social media only for posting and expect an outcome without doing anything else. The
computer systems and mobile technologies are becoming accountable for capturing the
operations of the market and it has resulted in turning a large population towards communicating
through social media instead of using the primitive form of communication (Hudson et al. 2016).
In the 21st century, social media is gaining momentum as numerous people are joining the
networking sites. The people have learnt the effective use of social media platforms and they are
the reason behind the booming of this industry. It is high time for the business enterprises to
spread on a global range by taking help of the excellent growth of social media. It does not mean
that the businesspersons have to follow social media because it is the ongoing trend, rather they
should use it for the sake of their target customers. a business survives because of the customers
so it is their responsibility to select the channels wisely which is connected to the customers. The

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key advantage of linking a business with the social media platform is to develop the business and
keep in touch with the customers at a higher level. It helps in influencing the online marketing
(Kumar et al. 2016).
A research carried out by (Nunan et al. 2018) found out that 71% of customers tend to
recommend a brand among his peer groups only if it has a positive feedback from the social
media platform. The percentage of adults using the social media platform has increased in 10
years from 7% to 69%. In the mobile applications too, the social media has experienced a growth
of 30% each year. Statistics have shown that around 2 millions businesses take support of Face
book advertising to promote their products and services (Schivinski and Dabrowski 2015).
Fig: Social media statistics
Source: (Schivinski and Dabrowski 2016)

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Fig: Statistics of growth of social media users
Source: (Shen et al. 2016)
The use of social media in the business environment has provided lots of opportunities
and advantages, which are given below:
Influence social advertising: Advertising through social media is the new trend in business
environment and it has resulted in an unbelievable growth in the business. The use of Facebook
ads can be used in this respect. The use of advertisement in social media was first introduced in
the year 2005, which resulted in gaining 9.16B ad revenue in the first half of 2017. It is a
reflection of the fact that social media is going to spread its positive impact for a long term in the
upcoming days. The advent of social media in the business and its related outcome has
encouraged other businesses to experiment in the similar field as they have realized its
importance in digital marketing (Swani et al. 2017).

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Decreased advertising cost: If social media is compared with the primitive forms of
advertising such as television, print, radio, then it can be found out that the contemporary forms
of advertising can be relied on as it is cost- effective. The businesses get the permission to
involve numerous social media channels free of cost for measuring the paid advertisements.
Opportunity is provided to the businesses to grow and develop independently at their own pace.
Specific and targeted reach: The primitive forms of advertising did not allow in reaching out
to the target audience as compared to the social media ads. Offline advertising is more like
throwing pebbles in the dark and there is no assurance that it will hit the aim. Moreover, the
return feedback might disappoint the business in case of offline advertising. On the other hand,
the use of social media to advertise about products and services for reaching out to the target
customers increase the conversions and result in getting higher return on investment (Trainor et
al. 2014).
Original performance evaluation: It is important to keep a follow- up if the advertisement is
gaining success in the market. It will be helpful for the companies to work on the betterment of
the advertisements. The drawback of offline advertising lies in not being able to track its
effectiveness in the market. This leads to a severe effect either in a positive or negative way.
Social media advertising holds a bigger advantage in this respect as it can keep a constant tab on
the effectiveness of its ads. The ad can be changed at any instant if it is not performing well and
check the outcome. It is an important part of the business to grow a realization that social media
is successful in spreading all over the globe to pose a positive impact on the business
environment. It has a bright future in front as the new media.

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Enhance brand awareness: Social media is strong equipment in terms of increasing brand
awareness. It is unwise for the businesses to ignore social media advertising for promoting their
products and services. In this way, they provide advantage to their competitors to establish their
business. However, a majority of the business personnel agree that social media has a positive
impact on increasing the brand awareness (Tuten and Solomon 2017). There are certain
strategies, which need to be followed by the business officials in order to increase their business
awareness by using social media:
The most important task is to find out the target audience at whom the ad will be aimed. It is
an immediate step prior to the selection of a suitable social media channel. One option of finding
out about the target audience is to seek for pertinent conversations about the product and
industry. For instance, Adobe is a significant B2B company, which might find their audience in
LinkedIn rather than Face book. The second step is to grab the attention of the target audience by
creating attractive visuals in the form of images and video. Social media enables two- way
communication so it is important to post, get feedback, tag, converse and mention (Wang,
Pauleen and Zhang 2016).
The positive aspects of social media in the business environment and its significance in
making the business better are discussed throughout the essay. However, it will be unwise to
ignore the challenges related to the social media marketing. Few challenges the business might
face in social media marketing is listed below:
The key challenge that the business might face is the way to develop a social media strategy.
If the businesses are not aware of the objective of social media advertising then it can be difficult

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for them to implement the same. It is required to set a group of social media goals to be specific
in attaining the desired outcome (Swani et al. 2017).
It might seem to be difficult for the business organizations to realize that the return on
investment in social media marketing is different from the primitive form of advertising. The
value of the Tweet is not easy to get by clicking on the advertisement. The businesses do not find
it easy to select a suitable social media platform for promotion. It might be daunting for them to
find out the appropriate platform in relation to their products and services. Many businesses
might fail to promote through digital marketing due to their incapability in selecting the
appropriate tool (Godey et al. 2016).
Conclusion
Therefore it can be concluded from the discussion that social media is an effective platform
to grow and develop a business. It has several benefits over the traditional form of media
advertising. However, there are certain challenges that the businesses might face while being
introduced to the process of digital marketing.

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