Essay Sample on Social Media: Connecting People and Building Relationships

Introduction

Social media networks attract our yearning to socialize as evidenced by the growing use of sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram among others. People use social media's technology and tools to interact with others and share critical life experiences with them. This way, social media enables people to expand and reach their individual networks in a way they might have never anticipated. Concurrently, companies also rely on social media to establish and develop a relationship with their customers and the community they serve. A major reason for this is to survive in the market place. It is worthy to note that companies have to market their products effectively by ensuring that they build better public relations and advertise strategically in alignment with their short and long-term goals.

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Birim (2016) reports that business organizations tend to rely more on strategic communication. This is manifested in product advertisement and marketing as wells as how they relate with the public. Public relations seem more essential to an organization as it aligns well with social responsibility. As organizations communicate to the public about their products, they seek to build a reputable image by offering a social value to the target market for them to gain a competitive advantage.

Social media has a substantial impact on the communication strategies an organization adopts to build a relationship with the people. The viral feature of social media alongside many users leads to businesses integrating this channel with their strategies to develop a wider customer base and accomplish more goals. From this perception, it becomes essential to understand how companies can embrace social responsibility on social media when communicating with the public.

The Concept of Social Responsibility Communication Within Social Media

Modern business practices require businesses to be socially responsible by ensuring they operate within the parameters of sustainability. Along with this, socially responsible communication has also gained interest among various companies based on the notion that ideas to steer a company forward are always channeled through communication (Cho et al., 2016). In other words, the formulation of an idea, its acceptance or rejection always depends on communication. This implies that for organizations to fulfill the demands of the public, they should communicate their social responsibility activities tactfully. However, researchers (such as Lewis, 2003 cited in Cho et al., 2016) have documented that the commitment of organizations to communicate their social responsibility deeds often fails due to a lack of better strategies. Moreover, it seems a challenge in the perception that it is likely to cause skepticism among the stakeholders regarding the organization's intentions to engage in social responsibility. This mostly occurs when the public thinks that an organization is utilizing social responsibility to glossing its image. Besides, organizations have different stakeholders who might be having conflicting expectations. For instance, investors may be aiming for high financial performance while society anticipates a different factor such as philanthropism or volunteering activities (Cho et al., 2016). Therefore, to avoid a glossing perception from the society or the stakeholders, an organization should make its reason for social responsibility activity open to everyone to clear doubts - information consistency.

Social media is a platform for sharing information where both the consumers and the organization share their preferences to perfect service delivery. In fact, in the digital media age, online social networks have made it easy for organizations to draw a step closer to consumers/stakeholders through public interactions held online. This has helped businesses to reshape their identity in three ways. First, organizations have been able to maintain a sound relationship with their stakeholders. Second, organizations have been able to communicate in a multidirectional manner due to the uncontrollable nature of information on online social platforms. Finally, social media has eased the way people access information - both good and bad (Cho et al., 2016). With such attributes, the identity of an organization remains disclosed to the public making it easier for the public to react in the quickest time possible to any sign of misleading information from an organization. Critically, this presents a drawback for organizations that aim to reach stakeholders using social media.

However, despite the challenges, several scholars (for example Kelleher & Miller, 2006; Lee & Park, 2013) have documented the positive effects affiliated with online interaction as far as society-organization relationship is concerned among other factors particularly, organization's attitude and public support. Social responsibility communication enables organizations to convey their social responsibility agenda with a lack of modification as it used to happen in traditional media. Also, the communication patterns change from the notion of involving one person communicating to many people to many people communicating to many (the staff of an organization communicating to the public).

Despite these benefits, most organizations seem to lack a strategy they can use to communicate the social responsibility activities online. This has limited the use of online social networks among most organizations. Based on this there are three social responsibility communication strategies (information, involvement, and response) organizations can use while engaging the stakeholders effectively (Cho et al., 2016). The three strategies follow the public relations model of three aspects namely two-way asymmetry, public information, and two-way symmetry (Grunig and Hunt, 1984 cited in Cho et al., 2016). In regards to strategic social responsibility communication, the three strategies can be modified into information and interaction strategies which lead to a two-way social responsibility communication strategy when using online social networks.

The scenario involving a two-way communication between an organization and part of its stakeholders (the public) leads to a new model of communication that liberates an organization from only engaging the shareholders when making decisions to involving multiple parties such as governmental bodies, trade associations, politicians among others (Cortado et al., 2016). This is an interacting strategy of communication that involves the public whenever an organization seeks to enforce a social responsibility activity. For instance, if a company is using Facebook to communicate its social responsibility, the public can like, comment, and share the company's post. Cho et al. (2016) refer to these as the engagement levels of Facebook and every social site has its engagement levels that will always involve the public. Critically, the comment sections should be of great relevance to an organization as it is the part that contains the views of the public and their thoughts about the company. It contributes to direct engagement with the company.

Nevertheless, in using social media, organizations might be wondering what level of engagement can warrant effective participation from the public. Research has established that this solely relies on information load - the amount of information a company post periodically to update the public (Cho et al., 2016). If a company updates the public with its social responsibility frequently, then there is a high probability that the public will not be engaged so much as there will be much to read. Longer intervals of updating information allow the public to synthesize the current information and give feedback appropriately. However, this happens when there is two-way symmetric communication i.e. an organization responds to the comments of the public to keep the conversation alive. It can help in the effective exchange of ideas.

Conclusion

In conclusion, organizations strive to improve the welfare of the society under which they operate. In the contemporary world, social responsibility is becoming increasingly important for organizations to adopt. On the other hand, the use of online social networks is also increasing to the availability of the internet. Since social responsibility entails the maintaining of a reputable image in the face of the public organizations are now seeking the opinions of the public regarding their actions. As a result, most organizations are turning to online social networks. This is an appropriate strategy to employ because the world has transformed into a digital media era where online social networks can be used to link up with everyone across the world. So, organizations can easily get public opinions from online networking platforms.

Nonetheless, it has been seen that using social media leads to a two-way communication channel and different engagement aspects based on the platform that a company uses. As a result, it would be appropriate for a company to follow the channel of communicating back to the public based on the responses they get. This is likely to make the public have a perception that they are being involved in the decision-making process of the company. Also, while doing this, organizations should avoid loading the public with numerous information updates as this can lead to reduced engagement from the public. All in all, organizations must continue to channel more efforts into social responsibility communication using social media to build stronger credibility of their messages and enhance their reputation in the eyes of the public.

References

Birim, B. (2016). Evaluation of Corporate Social Responsibility and Social Media as Key Source of Strategic Communication. Procedia - Social And Behavioral Sciences, 235, 70-75. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2016.11.026

Cho, M., Furey, L., & Mohr, T. (2016). Communicating Corporate Social Responsibility on Social Media. Business And Professional Communication Quarterly, 80(1), 52-69. https://doi.org/10.1177/2329490616663708

Cortado, F., Chalmeta, R., & Ntim, C. (2016). Use of social networks as a CSR communication tool. Cogent Business & Management, 3(1), 1187783. https://doi.org/10.1080/23311975.2016.1187783

Kelleher, T., & Miller, B. (2006). Organizational Blogs and the Human Voice: Relational Strategies and Relational Outcomes. Journal Of Computer-Mediated Communication, 11(2), 395-414. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2006.00019.x

Lee, H., & Park, H. (2013). Testing the Impact of Message Interactivity on Relationship Management and Organizational Reputation. Journal Of Public Relations Research, 25(2), 188-206. https://doi.org/10.1080/1062726x.2013.739103