The Social Media Awards take place tonight and for the second time, we get to celebrate the revolution of social media and recognise the major players in it.Obviously, there is everything to celebrate. Communication has been given life. You get to have messages relayed in the shortest time possible to whomever you feel wherever they are.
The reach-out capacity of social media is overwhelming. A single post on Facebook or Twitter has the power to influence perception about anything and entice other users to make certain decisions they thought they would never make. Corporate companies have cashed in on this often using social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to launch aggressive marketing campaigns that spill over to the public in no time.
The advertising budgets of companies have been cut down and it’s the many advertising agencies that could be benefitting the most. Whoever thought that an event could be promoted well just by logging onto Facebook or Twitter and letting the world know with just a single post? Social media reigns supreme in audience and that’s why sellers and buyers can meet in just one click.
You could easily sell a toothbrush to someone as far as Koboko.You create awareness in the simplest, fastest and cheapest way. And by cheap I mean everything is free. Everything posted on almost all social media platforms is free and that could be a problem as well. Now that people realise that there isn’t control on usage, people find it necessary to use it the way they feel like.
Social media could have been a saviour but could be a time bomb as well. The beauty of social media was that you could share pictures from a party with someone who was probably abroad and all this was to keep a smile on everyone’s face. But now a platform like Facebook is used to upload pictures that are meant to spite or annoy someone. If you want to mock anyone, tarnish someone’s reputation then Facebook is the tool. It’s like everyone is on standby to end your life socially. Disputes that used to be solved behind closed doors are being resolved on Facebook.Can you imagine? Marital woes that should always remain private are being brought onto social media.
Then we have the blogs. These ones will do anything for traffic, which eventually boosts audience and revenue. Stories are blown out of proportion so much that if someone is seen ‘cutting an onion’, blogs will report it as “he was seen hacking the onion’s booty”. The users of social media are simply reckless. The criticism on many blogs is not just but rather hateful. As much as we celebrate an era of digital communication, we must be mindful of the potential threat social media is capable of causing and think of a way of curbing that threat. Nice weekend guys.
