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Social media has taken over the business and personal sphere and has had a long-lasting impact on the way people communicate as social media becomes an integral part of their lives. From social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp to LinkedIn and Instagram, social media has become a portal for discussion.
As online communication brings information, awareness and news to audiences, it has facilitated as a resource to humankind with unfathomable reach and benefits for the whole world.
Let’s look the key points of importance of social media in the way people communicate today.
How Does Social Media Influence The Way We Communicate?
1# Increased Civic Awareness
As social media has changed the way of how we are governed by making the process more transparent, many leaders across the world have the opportunity to voice their opinions and thoughts on priority issues, by giving the people a better understanding of how the government works.
Before social media emerged, traditional media and government were the only two sources of information for the civil society. However, it has now changed for better, as it does not have any political influence over what information should reach the people. It backfires sometimes, as some individuals or organizations tend to misuse the power of social media by negatively influencing the general public.
2# Social Justice
Social media has been successful in bringing people face-to-face with humanitarian issues. Many social work organizations such as animal welfare, old age associations, fundraising organizations have taken to social media to create awareness about the issues of society.
Social media has brought activists together, as they raise their voice against any kind of injustice going around in the world. The #MeToo movement is the biggest example of social injustice as it helped men and women raise their voices against their personal experiences of sexual assault or harassment. People on social media come together to start several campaigns together, to get justice for the needy.
3# Enhanced Business Marketing
Social media brings everything to you just by click, including everything from news to products and services. The ease of access has taken over the traditional ways of shopping, reading news or even studying and working.
With education incorporated forums and social media chat rooms, any business can now conduct webinars, promote events or offer courses to people around the world for free or a subscription basis. As social media is a crucial segment of marketing, communicating the marketing message makes the business strategy successful and helps the businesses go beyond the demographic and geographic boundaries.
4# Emergency Management
Social media is known to be a tool to amplify messages across millions of people in a fraction of seconds. As man-made disasters, natural calamities or any other emergency, these days being Covid-19, social media has become a savior for the people in need and help in spreading their information, enabling relief funds and supporting them.
For instance, in the course of any natural calamity or disaster, there is a Facebook safety check feature which allows you to mark yourself safe in disaster zones, helping your friends and family know that you are safe, in case there is no other medium for communication available at that point.
5# Online Healthcare
With the pandemic going on, majority of people feel unsafe visiting the hospital around as they are scared, they might catch some infection. As online healthcare services has become an integral part of today’s world, social media has proved to be a great source of communication among doctors and patients.
Instead of visiting the hospital, social media channels now allow the doctors and patients to video chat to diagnose you based on your symptoms, and then prescribe you medication if the illness is not that serious. It can save you the trip to the clinic. Saying this, there are also a few drawbacks such as fake doctors pretending. It is sometimes difficult to confirm a doctor’s credibility by just their profile. However, if used properly and ethically, the online healthcare system has become a beneficia resource for people across the world.
6# Instant Customer Feedback
For businesses, social media plays a huge role in how they communicate with their target audience. Customer feedback is the foremost for businesses to rectify their mistakes, get user opinions about their products and services and to build their brand credibility and trust.
Through social media, users can give instant feedback on the products they are using to their followers, they can also tag the brand’s page on their posts and stories. Influencers can become brand advocates encouraging people to try the brand’s products. In this way, businesses get a chance to communicate with their users and to understand their needs better.
7# Sense of Urgency & Need to Share
No one likes to wait for hours to get responses and expect people to reply in the timeline of the conversations. As the sense of urgency often make people anxious about their family member, friend or partner not replying for a couple of hours.
Social media has also made communication for the youth much easier. In today’s world, everybody wants to share whatever they are doing- from restaurant orders to concerts, to places they are travelling to or if they just got hitched. It can be a positive as people are getting more exposure and becoming confident in who they are, it also has negative effects as it can cause an urge in people to become dependent on posting anything happening in their lives or painting those occurrences rosier than they actually are.
Bottom Line
Social media has given birth to several genres of communication, where conversations have become quicker and information has become easily relayed. From personal benefits to impacting business in several ways, online communication has helped the world in many ways using the gift of social media channels.
We hope you realize the influence of social media on communication in today’s world & how it has helped millions of users and businesses!