Business

The amount of time global consumers spent of social networking sites increased by 82% in between 2008 and 2010 (Neilsen 2010). With this huge increase of possible consumer use, businesses saw an opportunity to use SNS to their advantage. Businesses use social networking to aid sectors within their organisation, sectors such as sales, marketing, recruitment, technical support and research (Wilson,2009).

Social networking sites are an inexpensive, easy and real time method of communication (Jacob, 2009) and this is what attracts a business to them. A business can use one or many of these sites to engage with possible consumers, it also puts a human face to the business, meaning that current consumers or potential consumers will feel more comfortable when dealing with them.

Corporations use social networking as a method of communicating with consumers throughout many businesses. An example of this can be seen when Lenovo. The companies’ web marketing VP made the following statement about its twitter feeds “Twitter to monitor tweets about our brand-looking for people having a tough time with our products. I also see a lot of opportunity to sell through Twitter, and I expect we’ll open a ‘deal’ channel there soon”(Weber,2009). Using twitter feeds and making connections with their customers they could find out if customers were having problems with their products and try and solve the matter.

A further example can be seen looking at Virgin Trains. The business has a small team of dedicated staff who run the Twitter feed as part of their overall PR role. They use the feed to post information about late trains or problems on the lines.

Social networking sites such as LinkedIn were developed as a business networking tool for corporations. It does for businesses what Facebook does for the youth, its lets professionals exchange information, ideas and opportunities (LinkedIn,2011).

Recruitment is another reason why businesses use social networking sites, a survey carried out by Ceridian Connections [Jones, 2010] showed that 20% of employers admitted using SNS as part of their recruitment process. The argument for using SNS is that a site such as Facebook will tell the employer more about a candidate’s personality than a CV will, showing incriminating photographs about the applicant or showing applicant’s comments about a previous employer could be the deciding factor on whether the applicant gets employed. The other side to this argument is that it is unethical and invasion of privacy. The most commonly mentioned risk of using social networking sites for recruitment is the potential charge of discrimination [Ceridian Connections, 2011].

Rejecting a applicant based on the their SN profile could see the applicants lawyers asking to see the businesses IT records in order to try and prove discrimination based on that persons profile. There is also a risk of mistaken identity; a business may choose to reject an applicant based on an incriminating photograph as their profile picture. The profile picture may not be of the actually applicant and the business may be rejecting a potentially talented person.