Miller-Motte Technical College What is social media exactly? It is electronic communication through which users share ideas, information, personal messages, and other content. (Coulter, 2016) Social media has allowed information to be exchanged daily and around the world regardless of language or borders. (Russell, 2014) Social media has become undoubtly a very important tool, not only just in our personal lives but also in our professional lives. It’s impact on management is outstanding; as we will discuss in this paper it has postive impacts, negative impacts, and companies spend valuable resources on it and also write policies on how and when it should be used. Social media can have numerous benefits for organizations. It can prove helpful …show more content…
A well-written social media policy can: Provide employees with guidelines for communicating on social media, clearly state the organization’s expectations on what is acceptable to say or do online, thus ensuring the organization’s representatives understand what is right and wrong and the consequences of posting obscene, threatening, harassing, discriminatory or hateful content to or about another person or entity. Provide clarity around the organization’s values and culture for customers, employees and the public alike. Set expectations from the point of employee hiring, ensuring problems are proactively prevented rather than being left to impact the business and afterwards require a response. Allow the company to distribute the responsibility for content control and approval. Reduce lost time and productivity spent dealing with unauthorized usage of social media. Reduce risk and legal exposure for the business. (Duggan, 2013) To give you an idea of the resources companies use on social media here are some statistics. Social media earned an estimated $8.3 billion from advertising in 2015. 38% of organizations planned to spend more than 20% of their total advertising budgets on social media in 2015. (Smith, 2016) Another valuable resource besides money that orgnaizations are spending on social media is their time. 66 percent of small businesses are spending more time on social media compared to a year ago. 43 percent of small businesses spend about 6 hours per week on social media (about the equivalent of one whole workday). (King,