The Role of Social Media in Business

© March Oyinki 2017

The unprecedented explosion of social media is apparently attributed to GeoCities after its creation by David Bohnett‎ and John Rezner, and launch by ‘Yahoo!’ in ‎November 1994. GeoCities was the first website that started allowing users to setup personalized homepages. In 1997, Usenet and Six Degrees both started their first social network websites, but Six Degrees is widely believed to be the first actual social media site, because it allowed users to create a profile and connect with friends.

The Origin of Social Media

Social media sites such as MySpace and LinkedIn emerged in the early 2000s, and sites like Photobucket and Flickr pioneered and facilitated online photo sharing. Five years down the line, YouTube was launched in 2005, which provided the platform for sharing video content. It was in 2006 that Facebook and Twitter made their grand entry into the social media space, and the social media environment has since then gone through an astonishing evolution with many other websites like Tumblr, Spotify and Pinterest springing up.

The transformation of Social Media raged like wild fire because of its ability to provide real-time broadcast of messages, photographs and videos to a large audience speedily and  simultaneously across the globe. Social Media soon became a tool for advocacy and social mobilization around the world. Its powerful impact was felt when social campaigners in different parts of the world started to mobilize the masses doing the uprising in countries such as the Philippine, Egypt, Algeria and France in the late 90s and early 2000, that triggered sweeping changes in the political landscape in these regions, and eventually lead to the successful change of the leadership of these countries, were all attributed to the power of the social media to call to action a large number of people during these uprising.

Social Media as a Business Tool

Social media has since gained acceptance as the broadcast tool and medium for freedom of expression of the thoughts of the common people and a channel through which they contribute their individual opinions to prevalent national discourse. Social media is a tool used mostly by individuals to communicate and share messages, photographs and videos with friends and family members, but because of its outstanding ability to provide instant feedback by way of direct individual responses to specific issues, and business owners saw this window as an opportunity for research and today social media has become the most effective tool for collating customer reaction to their products and service.





Advertisers and social media marketers have hijacked social media and have now turned it into a $2 trillion industry that have created more jobs and generated higher revenue than traditional advertising channels. Social media is now used by businesses in many different ways, and primarily, with the objective of attracting more customers, promoting brand visibility and increasing sales of their products and services. Social media is one of the most effective channels in the digital media marketing mix.

The Future of Social Media

Social media is rapidly developing into an ecommerce platform and have already started making strong entries with applications such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn leading the way. With the increasing expansion of the capabilities of the mobile devices such as smart phones and tabs, social media is gradually consolidating its role as a major player in the ecommerce environment for both private individuals and corporate organizations.

Social media has effectively dominated the use of mobile phones, over-taking the phone's customary functions of dialing and messaging.  The extensive use of social media, which is estimated to attracts over 1billion followers worldwide, makes it the largest single visual marketplace and one of the most used leads generating digital marketing channels. Those business owners that consider social media as irrelevant and time-wasting, and have refused to follow the trends and participate fully in it, are indeed the greatest losers.
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