SOCIAL MEDIA FOR BUSINESS

Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn… just some of the big names that pop into our heads at the mention of the word social media. We all know examples of social media sites and applications but few can actually describe what social media is. Some even have a misconception about it being a place where people with nothing important to do spend their time chatting away. Today, we clear the air about this and find out what social media actually is and how we can use it to our benefit in the corporate world.

According to google, these are  websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking.

In a world where technology is regarded as a basic need and millions of people are online on one social media platform or another, businesses should be dominating the social media sphere, but this seemingly simplistic task has proven challenging to many and only a few have been able to capitalize on it’s use. 

From marketing to e-commerce, plain customer service to running the entire business online, the possibilities as limitless, and businesses have barely tapped to the potential of this new business tool that could be the key to transforming the business world and taking it to a whole new level.

Some major categories of e-business include -:

1. BUSINESS TO CONSUMER. (B2C)

Often referred to as B2C, this simply describes transaction between businesses and individual consumers which may actually be the most common of all.

2. BUSINESS TO BUSINESS. (B2B)

Also known as B2B which describes online transactions between businesses and other businesses.

3. CONSUMER TO CONSUMER. (C2C)

This describes online transactions between consumers and other individual consumers. a popular example of this could be the OLX app where anyone can sell their products online and interested customers can contact them to make the purchase.

These being just some of the examples… the list could go on and on of the various possible business transactions, but all these in general are faced with some challenges.

CHALLENGES.

For simplicity, we will talk about limitations of e-commerce and not focus on e-business as a whole.

These can be divided into two categories -:

1. Technological challenges.

2. Non-technological challenges.

1. TECHNOLOGICAL CHALLENGES.

i) Telecommunications bandwidth is insufficient especially for m-commerce(mobile commerce). This makes accessing the internet a huge challenge.

ii) Internet accessibility is still expensive and inconvenient.

iii) Software development tools are still in development, meaning what we have now could be obsolete in the near future.

iv) There is lack of universally accepted standards for quality, security and reliability.

v) Special web servers are needed in addition to network servers which is and additional cost.

2. NON TECHNOLOGICAL.

i) There are some privacy and security concerns that deter customers from buying online.

ii) Many people don’t trust paperless transactions.

iii) There’s an insufficient amount of sellers and buyers that are needed for profitable e-commerce transactions.

iv) Some customers like to feel and see products before they actually buy them.

v) There’s an increasing amount of fraud over the internet

With this in mind, it is clear that social media has a huge potential to slingshot many businesses to greater heights, but first we must deal with the problems facing e-commerce and e-business to get the full benefit from social media.