With substantial internet penetration and the explosion of internet-enabled devices, social media has become a part of our daily lives more than ever. The genesis of social media has been conceived in the pre-internet era with the primary purpose of transmitting messages across the network. Social media got its real shape post the invention of the internet when Digital communication saw its growing importance. Social media in a way has tapped in the strong human urge of interacting with people and has largely fulfilled their social needs. We have witnessed a gradual but ground-breaking evolution from the electronic information exchange age to today’s digital transformation world.

In the initial stages of the internet’s growth, we have witnessed applications facilitating email communications, online chatting, and other broadcast messaging platforms, post which, blogging, and dating sites started gaining popularity which garnered a lot of traction in this digital communication space. The number of users going online saw a sudden spike and a whole virtual world came into existence. With an increasing server load, technologies evolved to cater to such problems. Various business applications began to gather steam to fulfill other needs & aspirations of people. LinkedIn spawned thereafter for career-minded professionals. The wide spectrum of services it provides attracted a lot of users gaining a dominant position in this space. While this application gathered people on a professional front, Facebook gained its monopoly in the personal social networking domain by stimulating people’s social needs. The exponential growth in social media users can be testified by the fact that 72% of adults use some form of social media today from a mere 5% in 2005. With this surge in online users & the kind of different apps taking their shape in this domain, there are various ways in which users can use them to their advantage. A few of the essential ones I have listed below:

Online Business: With the advent of social media, the way businesses were done has changed dramatically. Social media presents multiple opportunities for businesses to leverage upon. Businesses use these apps to create awareness & engage users with their brands. Digital marketing has become one of the most important marketing strategies. Even startups & entrepreneurs leverage these platforms to build their brands and can get access to the large pool of online users as their target market. On the consumer side, even they are more vigilant about the brands they want themselves to associate with, and what better than social media apps to gather the needed details. As per one of the surveys, 83% of the consumers want their brands to stay responsive on social media. Customer forums are created to gather and analyze their reviews and feedback about the products they launch in the market. Reaching out to a larger audience without much capital investment & inconvenience, businesses can improve their visibility and manage their brands efficiently and strategically.

Jobs & Career: The tedious way of the traditional job-search process has become a relic of the past. People have now adopted the online mode of searching for their next opportunity and their benefits are immense. Besides the job portals, they can leverage social media like LinkedIn in this regard. Getting a new job is all about having great professional networking, referrals & testimonies of colleagues who worked with you, showcasing your online profile to the maximum recruiters possible, and who better than LinkedIn makes all these possible. Advanced algorithms today also help you give your job match score which indicates the extent to which your profile matches the job requirements. Even company recruiters actively leverage these apps to post their jobs and look out for suitable candidates. You can build professional relationships with anyone from any organization and can build careers seeking advice from a veteran of their same field. Freelance & other part-time jobs or any other form of passive income can also be possible through these connections.

Forming personal relationships: The primary purpose of social media apps is to connect people from distant places having similar interests. Given the hectic schedule we are occupied with, these apps help us stay connected with a distant friend or an acquaintance. Apps like Facebook, Instagram, are built primarily on this principle. They share their long-lasting memories in form of photos/videos to bring smiles to their faces even without their physical presence. Recently, Facebook surpassed 1 billion registered accounts and the count of active users per month has reached around 2.5 billion. Groups of people having similar interests can be formed to facilitate sharing of more content in a lesser amount of time.

While we look at its pros and look to leverage them to benefit us, we cannot overlook the other side of it. There is a downside to everything and social media apps are no different. Given it is a virtual world and connections can form between anyone, we need to be cautious when revealing our personal data to avoid any sort of misuse. By embedding certain advanced technologies like Google Analytics, SEOs, AI, ML, the social media apps supply information to the businesses to form their target audience. While security has become a grave concern today, as the data is being used for marketing or any other purposes, I believe the apps have reasonably managed to maintain a certain level of security, given the data explosion that happens today. To conclude, the gap between virtual and physical has been bridged by these apps for all these years and in this hyper-connected world, social media needs to be harnessed to its potential to cater to our needs, passion, and interests to fulfill our dreams and achieve our goals.

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