Is Social Media a Revolution or Fad??????

Social media is not just a fad. It is a basic shift in the way we communicate.Yes, you can say that Facebook and Twitter are just for kids and it's just time wasting activity but look around social media is beyond these, it's just not about social media tools it is the revolution that we all have adopted eventually.

Perceptions of social media are changing and it is not happen just like that. It is used to be understand as a fad which will to be fade  after some time. Because people considered it as just teenager obsession but eventually it has become an fundamental part of the advertising efforts of almost all well know famous brands of the world.

Over the years we have seen some dramatic changes in way we communicate. Since the introduction of the Web 2.0, social media has made it easier for people to build something and put it online in order to get criticized and get remarked by audience. Because of this we are able to communicate, discuss, get entertain, can study anytime from anywhere in the world.. It is lading us to the totally new dimension of communication and modifying conversation to a many-to may model. The other great thing about social media is that, it is a different from traditional media in the term of accessibility, involvement and connectedness. With web 2.0  model whole world stay connected all the time. Following Statistic  proves that : years to reach 50 million users: Radio, 38 years; TV, 13 years; Internet, 4 years; iPod, 3 years. Facebook added 100 million users in less than nine months; iPhone applications hit 1 billion in nine months (Social Media Facts | Ruby Media Group).

Another thing is that social media is not just limited to the chatting and networking. It is really more than that. People meet online even there are so many online dating sites are available. One out of eight couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media. It also helps in study A 2009 U.S. Department of Education study revealed that, on average, online students outperformed those receiving face-to-face instruction.Facebook claimed that it had 1 billion monthly active users, Twitter has 500 million registered users and 750 tweets are shared per second. Flickr now hosts more than 5 billion images. Wikipedia has over 23 million articles with 4.1 million in English. YouTube gets 4 billion views per day, and 72 hours of video are uploaded every minute.

Social media is new marketing tool for the companies. Seventy-eight percent of consumers trust peer recommendations. Even for the professional world networking is most important thing LinkedIn the world's largest professional network has 187 million members in over 200 countries. Eighty percent of companies use LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees. Even people use it for awareness and it works also. In India, 2008 they ran a social cause to save endangered animal tiger under the name of "save the tiger" on Facebook which got 2,534,267 likes and eventually helped to raise  Rs. 5,81,00,000.

In very close future, we will not be searching for any goods, news, entertainment and services. They will find us and come after us via social media. Universal McCann's Global Social Media Survey shows that all the social media sites are doing only progress since they have been introduce. In the years, many people have wondered if social media is a fad. Having been heavily involved in social media for more than 6 year, my answer is no, social media is not....!!!


References:
http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2066771/Social-Media-Fad-or-Revolution
http://jeffhurtblog.com/2012/04/19/social-media-fad-or-revolution-2012/
https://www.facebook.com/savethetigerindia
http://tiger.ndtv.com/