Ramification of Social Media for The Growth of Business Online

In a relatively lesser period of time, social technology has gained favor from the consumers at a greater speed than other technologies. For television to be owned by fifty million families, a time period of thirteen years and for the internet to earn its fifty millionth subscribers, three full years were needed. On the contrary, Facebook took only a year to win its fiftieth million users and Twitter took as long as nine months to do the same. The acceleration in the adoption pace of consumers worldwide has been largely affected by social, cultural and economic changes worldwide. Due to the fact that digital applications of any kind with involvement of people's interactions, can add "social" features to themselves, t here has been an increase in the number of users and the challenges faced in measurement. Some of the benefits associated with business online are discussed below.

Productivity Benefits:

The use of social media for improvement in communication and collaboration across and within the companies has high possibility of raising the interaction workers' productivity up to twenty five percent. The cause of changes of such dramatic nature is only possible because of the shift in channels from phone, email, fax (one-to-one) to social media (many-to-many). However, in order to capture the full potential of these technologies for improvement in communication and collaboration, there has to be changes in organization and novelty in management approaches. This can be a time-consuming process.

Benefits to Business:

Apart from opportunities in productivity, there are other associated benefits in areas like customer services, consumer marketing (for example, automotives and packaged products) and for detecting frauds (like the insurance sector). The main three sectors that have been greatly profited through the use of social media include:

• Manufacturing industry
• Packaged goods
• Financial services
• Professional services

Practices on Applications of Social Media:

• Encouraging Interactions: Encouraging the use of technologies for interaction is important as there is no choice remains the same i.e. the "social media". The scale, economics and scope of social media brought via the internet to raise the level of interaction among humans. However, cultures and practices have greater impact on the improvement in communication and collaboration to encourage such interactions.
• Experimentation: Those activities that have an impact on a single organization do not necessarily need to have the same effect on other organizations. There can be changes with respect to competitive context, customer base or workforce. Experimentation on purpose can help in determining what areas are affected by different technologies. Measure should be taken based on these experimentations.
• Technological Implication: It is important for all the companies to nurture adoption of cycles of self-reinforcement. Vocal support and role modeling by leaders help in making far better decisions than by just using technologies of various kinds.

These practices and the associated benefits of using social media for expansion of a company are dynamic in nature. Various studies and research are under process for developing more strategies that will benefit in the expansion of the company. Social media remains one of the most used ways for online business.

James Pattrick is a popular author writing articles on member satisfaction surveys and more related topics. In this article he has given information regarding the importance of social media in growing businesses