The role of social networks in empowering consumers Literature review

The role of social networks in empowering consumers - Literature review Example Organizations, as a part of the current global business forum, are increasingly feeling the need for engaging with the community to which it provides its service. Companies realize that the societies within which these companies operate and the communities to which their customers belong, are an important element in their business decisions. This shows that consumers are increasingly becoming an important stake holder for business firms. Companies are responding to this new status of the consumers by utilizing in all possible channels to engage in consumer interaction. Therefore they feel the need to assess their response to the changing consumer preference and also the efficiency with which they are utilizing the social media. Background of the study The growth rate of social media shows an exponential trend and the main features in this platform are blogs, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn. If this information is matched with statistical data it would be found that by the beg inning of the 2010, over 175 million users were already registered in the Facebook. This figure is slightly short of the total number of people living in Brazil (total Brazilian population was 190 million in 2009) and it is more than twice the German population (total population of Germany was 80 million in 2009) (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010). During this period, a record amount of video content has been uploaded to the YouTube platform at the rate of 10 hours of content per minute. These platforms offer customers to receive variety of information and also join ongoing conversations with millions of other customers located in different parts of the globe. Hence rise of social networking sites have become a major topic of discussion in the business world. Consumers and social networking sites Tweets on Twitter and messages and updates on Facebook are the newest means of communication and the most convenient method of sharing news. These channels allow news to be shared in the structure of small bite-size messages. These message updates also allow the user to add links to various website pages or images to the message. Tweets are messages of less than or equal to 140 characters and the reader can get an overview of the message shared through the tweets by simply scrolling through the tweets. Any person can read these tweets (even if he or she is not an account holder on the Twitter) through their mobile phones or their computers. These Twitter tweets are short and precise and does not relate to the news at a deeper level, but, the reader can gain an overall broad knowledge about the happenings in the world in that particular day. This the most important use of the social networking sites these days. Consumers are careful about the choices that they make about their purchases but are not left with only limited amount of time to make purchasing decisions. Therefore more and more number of consumers are shifting their attention to the social media for gaining insight s on the most recent trends, views and briefs of experiences of the