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TopSocial media may be defined as technology-facilitated dialogue among individuals or groups. User is the king of this media and has become both producer and consumer of contents on social media.
From the early days of late 1970s when public messaging started in its crude form with creation of Usenet and later development of Weblog or blogs, social media has deeply penetrated in society. With Web 2.0 technologies, blogs writing also became a two-way communication rather than monotonous uploading of contents by the blog writer alone. Blogging was followed by micro-blogging sites like Twitter. In 2004 Facebook the social networking site was first time launched by Mark Zuckerberg. As per data available till August 2015, Facebook had 1.8 billion monthly active users and no wonder by this time this number might have crossed 2 billion. There is hundreds of social networking sites available like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Xing, YouTube, WhatsApp, Orkut, My Space, Flicker, Instagram etc. meant for different purposes but with common aim of sharing information to each other. A detailed list is available on Wikipedia.
Emergence of social media has helped connecting and sharing information among individual users. Businesses and organizations have also found these platforms highly attractive where they could connect with billions of users for advertising their products or to share their messages at a very less cost. It is a new but effective medium for advertising, marketing and branding. Most popular among these sites are Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and WhatsApp according to share of active users’ base and hence are popular among organizations due to their sheer reach among users. Organizations find them the best medium for electronic world of mouth publicity and also act a mass media platform for their advertising.
Facebook, the online social media website, as mentioned above has crossed 1.8 billion monthly active users at the end of second quarter of 2015 world over. Similarly, the micro blogging site Twitter had 304 million monthly active users at the end of second quarter on 2015. This number is fast rising. These figures show reach of advertising on social media. The young generation is largest users’ segment of social media. For businesses that constitutes most attractive potential customer segment.