FourEyesSquad

The boom in the use of Social Networking sites has already been with us for nearly a decade already. During this span, we have seen quite a number of sites that made it big, sites that crashed, and sites that had to completely reformat their niches and styles in order to survive. These successes, changes, and failures are merely manifestations of the fact that social networking is something that is constantly changing and adapting according to the time.

As of now, experts are saying there are already shifts that are slowly being realized in social media and social networking. These are trends that a business owner who is looking to leverage such sites for business purposes must look into in order for them to find success.

The social networking trends include:

Transparency:

Nowadays, companies are using social networking sites as platforms to enable their customers to see a different side of them. They are now trying to reach out to them and talk about their usual activities instead of being a tight lipped conglomerate.

This can be attributed to the fact that social networking enables businesses to have some sort of transparency and many current and potential clients are searching for it in a business.

Mobile compatibility:

Another current trend is to come up with mobile content. With internet becoming more and more available to people who use their phones, PDAs or even the small netbooks, having to come up with aesthetically pleasing content that is easy to load is becoming more and more important. Now, it is important that you would be able to cater to people looking for a quick browse of your blog through their phones.

That’s why it is now becoming more common to see the mobile versions of the various popular sites and even the corporate blogs or sites of the company.

When people discuss work or the operations within the company, you may often hear people talk about the “IT side” of the operations as well as the “business side” of it. This is especially relevant when it comes to outsourcing some of the services or processes of the company. They would often say let’s just outsource this “tech stuff” so that we can focus on our business.

When you think about it though, there really is no such thing as an IT side or a business side. This is because there really is no business today that does not require any IT infrastructure to be able to support it. From large corporations that populate the bustling skyscrapers of the city to the small businesses found in the streets near our homes, all of them would be running through the help of some form of information technology.

To realize that there really is no distinction between IT and your business is actually very important for outsourcing. This is mainly because we would often see companies not really caring about the outsourced IT services simply because it is not part of their “core competencies”. One should realize that if they hire outsourced IT services that are not up to standard, they would actually be crippling their ability to work their business.

On the other hand, simply outsourcing staff who are skilled in the IT side of things but have very limited knowledge about the ins and outs of the business would also lead to some problems. They would not know the proper framework that they would need to work on in order to help improve their operations.

As you can see, when it comes to outsourcing your company’s IT and Business, there really is no divide. One should go hand and hand with the other in order for it to be effective.

We have tackled in previous articles how social media is able to give small businesses a chance against their larger competitors when it comes to spreading the word through advertising and promotions. It was said that through social media, you would not need to have a huge amount to engage your clients, as long as you have a good marketing strategy.

Of course, it won’t take long for the larger companies, even those in the fortune 100, to utilize these advantages as well. They are now utilizing social media, and are becoming active in sites such as social networks and blogging. In fact there is even a graph that shows just how much these companies are utilizing them:

So what does large companies becoming involved in youtube, twitter, and facebook mean for the small businesses that previously lorded over these platforms? Does it mean that they would no longer be able to maintain that equality that social media and social networking marketing used to provide them?

Well the answer to that comes in two ways. The first is that yes, the advantage that they used to have would now be slowly eroded. As more and more companies with more resources get in on the trend, you would be able to see more well designed pages, more interactive blogs, and other higher end pages on these sites.

However, another opinion could be that it doesn’t really matter if it is high end as these social networking sites are not offering much when it comes to aesthetics anyway.  You would still be able to attract consumers with a limited budget as long as you have a good and well thought out marketing strategy. You should just consider the large companies as nothing more than the usual competition.