The growth of social media has led to the growth of businesses. Home grown businesses such jewellery businesses, small phone case businesses and many other such businesses have started and built up on social media. Many cosmetic brands such as Sugar Cosmetics have grown from only selling on their website to opening offline stores all due to their social media marketing strategies. Social media has provided as a platform for marketing, selling, providing customer care and running almost all aspects of your business.
Teenagers have gotten the platform to create small businesses for their hobbies and passions. Housewives have gotten the platforms to create businesses from family recipes. Yes, it is undeniable that social media has provided a ton of opportunities to all types of people to become entrepreneurs. Moreover, social media has performed the function of an advertisement company, your posts, your reels are your ads on Instagram.
You attract your niche of customers. It is a fact that social media has had a bountiful impact on small businesses and new startups but there is also the other end of the spectrum that must be taken into consideration.
Social media is a double edged sword in all the aspects it is discussed in. When it comes to business. It is a unique tool that can cause just as much harm as good. Social media provides a new platform not only to form businesses, but also market them.
With this newness, comes unfamiliarity. Businesses that don’t market on social media fear that they’ll get left behind in this day and age’s rat race to the finale. It forces them to come up with a completely new strategy and re-allocate funds towards creating content, graphic, reels, stories and other functions of social media marketing. A completely new and unfamiliar platform that shows marks of the traditional billboard ads but simultaneously depends on a fickle algorithm is daunting to many.
While newer small businesses are quicker to adapt to fresh marketing strategies, older businesses that have built their brand on traditional means of marketing find it much harder to accommodate to this new and dubious form of marketing.
Reduced employee interaction is also an often overlooked impact of social media. Many sociological studies have shown that when the employees of a company have good and healthy interpersonal relationships the company thrives. This means going to lunch together, bunching together around the watercooler, looking to each other for help with certain tasks and a sense of candidness. Social media has a major impact on work place interactions.
The lunch tables are now lined with different foods and phones unlocked next to them. Employees look to different social media networks such as twitter and Instagram to rant about their day and disperse the seeds of office gossip.
The diminishing interaction directly impacts the ability of employees to work as a team, dragging it right down with it. Employees need to have conversations about more than just their work to function well as a team. This phenomenon is a prime example of how social media impacts businesses in concealed ways.
Moreover, social media disperses power into the hands of the consumer. While this is a godsend for the customers, it also creates a scene of black and white yes or no’s for the brand itself. If a consumer leaves a bad comment on the brands social media, the potential customers flee away from the brand. In the age of “don’t trust the internet blindly”, the reviews of a complete and total stranger have the value of the reviews of a close friend or family. While a bad review can destroy a brand, without providing it an opportunity to do better and redeem its name, positive reviews get lost in the sea of comments and reposts.
Now, brands are forced to chase influencers that will speak of their product specifically to drive their niche.
Social media has changed the world as we knew it. A brand’s social media is now their home field, if you can’t play well on the home field, you won’t do well at the competitions. Changing out your homefield is the equivalent of swiping the ground from under your feet, it leaves you completely shaken up, and so has social media left businesses.
Those that get through, get through with amazing benefits. But many businesses still struggle to even understand the full extent of the potential social media holds for them. While big corporations can afford to create entirely new departments to handle their socials, entrepreneurs and small businesses are left to fend for themselves, learn off YouTube and create strategies on their own.
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