Question

The reading assignments this week discuss the role of social media in e-commerce. According to Oyza and Edwin (2015), social media has proven to be as effective or more effective than more traditional marketing methods. In some ways, social media has disrupted marketing as we know it. Discuss how savvy businesses can harness social media to encourage business success. What are the challenges they face? How do businesses 'keep up' in an environment that changes so rapidly? Paper Guidelines The paper should be 3-4 pages in length, in your own words, properly cite any outside resources.

Answer 1

E-commerce, in plain English, can be explained as the commercial trade off over the internet with minimal offline resources being utilized. E-commerce has not only been a revolution but has changed the way that businesses work and function in a specified market place. An even better addition to the e-commerce and its wide reach and support has been the fast emergence of social media. Social Media is the use of social networking tools which are used to spread advertisements, updates, news and every detail of whereabouts happening around the globe. Social media, although has been in existence for nearly a couple of decades, however, it has become highly used in the last 6-8 years.

                                        Social media is a platform which attracts a huge population around the world. The gluing factor to social media is its appealing factors which can suit almost every section of the society and all the age groups. Right from a child to the very old can find whatever they please over Social media to keep themselves entertained and updated with the world. Hence Social media ha become so popular around the globe. Social media now is being increasingly used to blossom other businesses and promote them effectively at a very cheap rate. Social networking websites and other social platforms by default provide the users with the option to share their thoughts and feelings with others in the society, who could be either known to them or unknown. This feature has helped the business firms to spread the knowledge about the product in the form of personal updates. Moreover, realizing the growing trend of their sites being used for business promotion and other business activities, social media platforms have now started to officially include advertisements and other business promotion methods by charging a nominal fee for it. This fee is however many times cheaper in comparison to the charge or cost the business units may need to spend on offline promotions. Therefore, almost every business unit, now a days, focus on promotions through social media. Another reason for the upbeat of the social media platforms is their reach. Wherever internet can reach out, social media can reach out too, thereby making its reach spread to almost all nook and corners of the world.

  Although, social media platforms are very effectively used by the business units around the world, but there are a number of factors that raise up formidable challenges for the use and spread of business activities through Social media. Let us discuss some of the notable challenges that have gripped the business in their e-commercial activities. Social media, although is a very effective tool, but it cannot do everything. At the end of the day, there has to be offline mechanism that can support the social platforms for the proper disbursements of the e-commerce products to their consumers. Moreover, it has been found that e-commerce is being increasingly used to spread fake information and products which actually do not pertain to fulfill the consumers demand as they claim over their advertisements. It is easier for the firms to create an online advertisement and spread it quickly, in comparison to actually adding value to their products and services. Moreover, social media platforms have more appeal to the youth rather than all other sections of the society, and therefore the reach is usually to some extent limited to only the youth of the world. Many anti-social activities are also promoted if proper checks are not done by the social media IT department before any update is posted on any social media platform. The e-commerce firms face a serious challenge of ever rising new firms, more so over the internet than in reality. This is because exaggeration over social media is possible by diluting facts and promoting a product. Therefore, social media and e-commerce is a mixed bad of new opportunities and advanced social interaction, however this only when it is being judiciously monitored.