WRTG 394 Assignment 2: Social Media Benefits and Challenges Analysis

This report synthesizes research on the impact of social media on businesses, examining both its advantages and disadvantages. It analyzes various articles to highlight key themes, including social media's effectiveness as a communication tool, its role in cost-effective marketing, and its potential for ...Read More

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Social Media
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In today’s competitive business world, organisations are focusing on generating a
competitive advantage by relying on social media to increase their brand awareness across
the globe. Social media sites provide a tool for businesses which allows them to reach out to a
diverse customer base without incurring huge costs. There are various benefits of using social
media in businesses for both internal as well as external operations. However, there are
various challenges or pitfalls to businesses that uses social media as well. Companies are
vulnerable to data breaches and negative publicities when they use social media sites. The
thesis will argue that there are both benefits as well as challenges available for businesses that
use social media in their operations. The objective of this synthesis essay is to evaluate
different articles on this topic to highlight their key themes that are relating to the topic.
Jussila, Kärkkäinen & Aramo-Immonen (2014) conducted a study to understand how
social media sites are used by technology companies in order to build better business to
business (B2B) relationships. This study highlighted that social media is an effective tool for
internal communication which allows technology companies to manage their operations
globally in real time, share information between their team members and effectively manage
collaborative projects. In this study, the sample files of 125 B2B companies were taken to
evaluate available opportunities and challenges for them while using social media. These
companies’ uses social media in order to gain insights about their customers on a global scale
which helps them make informed decisions. However, they face challenges such as non-
reliability of the collected data, and concerns relating to information security and data breach.
A key theme highlighted in this article was that social media is effective tool for internal
communication with customers, employees and suppliers and it allows companies to gain
insight about their customer base; however, another theme is challenges which companies
face such as vulnerability towards cyber-attack and unreliability of collected data. These
themes are also highlighted in other studies conducted on the same topic.
Macnamara & Zerfass (2012) provided that social media is becoming a common tool
for communication by companies since it allows them to share information in real time which
facilitates team collaboration on a global scale. However, this study highlighted challenges of
balancing openness, strategic implementation and proper management of social media in the
workplace. it becomes difficult for companies to ensure that their employees did not use
social medias for their personal work. Promoting engagement of employees is another key
challenge relating to social media. Miles & Mangold (2014) argued that employees can
misuse social media to leak sensitive data about a company or these accounts can get hacked

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by cyber criminals which can increase challenges for companies. Despite having many
benefits, challenges of using social media for employee communication is clearly highlighted
in this study.
Fan & Gordon (2014) highlighted another key benefit of social media in their study
by evaluating the analytical skills of social media and how its power can allow companies to
collect relevant data regarding their markets. Millions of users share their private information
on social media sites which is a data goldmine for companies to collect relevant data from
their target audience and understand key patterns in their purchasing decisions and changing
preferences. Stieglitz, Mirbabaie, Ross & Neuberger (2018) also provided in their study that
social media analytics allows companies to use big data technology by collecting large data
sets in order to extract key patterns relating to their customer behaviour which allows them to
predict future changes which gives them a competitive edge. However, there are certain
pitfalls of using this technology as well such as users can share false data on social media
sites and certain data can predict wrong patterns which could hinders the profitability of a
company by making its products and services ineffective in the changing business
environment.
Along with the use of social media in data analytics, organisations also use these
platforms to market their products and services directly to customers. Tiago & Verissimo
(2014) provided in their study that digital marketing and social media websites provides cost
effective marketing options for companies to directly reach out to their targeted customer
base. They highlighted that companies are able to avoid cost relating to traditional marketing
sources such as television, print media, and billboards by relying on social media marketing
which is highly inexpensive than compared to these options. However, the study also showed
that ineffectiveness of social media platforms to influence and encourage customers to make
purchasing decisions. Royle & Laing (2014) developed a model in their study regarding use
of digital marketing in communication industries which allows companies to eliminate key
gaps in their previous strategies. This study also emphasises on the same theme which argues
that social media is an effective way to reach out to a large customer base while sharing
relevant information with customer base. Companies can also rely on social media platforms
to communicate with their customers and employees while promoting their offerings in the
markets.

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Based on the above observations, it can be concluded that the use of social media sites
provides both benefits and challenges for businesses. Different articles are analysed on this
topic which highlighted key themes relating to social media benefits such as effective
communication tool, cost effective marketing option and successful data analytics option for
companies. However, some studies also highlighted negative themes or pitfalls which
businesses face while using social media such as inability of influencing customers
purchasing decisions through promotions, unreliable data collection source, and distracting
communication tool for workplace.

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References
Fan, W., & Gordon, M. D. (2014). The power of social media analytics. Communications of
the ACM, 57(6), 74-81.
Jussila, J. J., Kärkkäinen, H., & Aramo-Immonen, H. (2014). Social media utilization in
business-to-business relationships of technology industry firms. Computers in
Human Behavior, 30, 606-613.
Macnamara, J., & Zerfass, A. (2012). Social media communication in organizations: The
challenges of balancing openness, strategy, and management. International journal
of strategic communication, 6(4), 287-308.
Miles, S. J., & Mangold, W. G. (2014). Employee voice: Untapped resource or social media
time bomb?. Business Horizons, 57(3), 401-411.
Royle, J., & Laing, A. (2014). The digital marketing skills gap: Developing a Digital
Marketer Model for the communication industries. International Journal of
Information Management, 34(2), 65-73.
Stieglitz, S., Mirbabaie, M., Ross, B., & Neuberger, C. (2018). Social media analytics–
Challenges in topic discovery, data collection, and data preparation. International
journal of information management, 39, 156-168.
Tiago, M. T. P. M. B., & Veríssimo, J. M. C. (2014). Digital marketing and social media:
Why bother?. Business horizons, 57(6), 703-708.