Why social media is easy and tough to manage?

  Social media is free and provides scalable service without many hiccups. Social media networks are slowly replacing main stream media. Do you know that TV ratings of NDTV, CNNIBN, TimesNow and many others are constantly dropping down? This is because users are shifting to Twitter, Facebook for news platforms. Do you know India has the most users of Facebook? This is just one sample case. Users are flooding to social media and posting images, videos and carry on many other activities. This is why a whopping $9.2 billion is invested in social media marketing to get online users on board. Intellipaat, a leading e-learning platform is therefore providing training on social media. But the question is it easy or tough to manage social media.

  

Social media management is easy

A small workforce would suffice

               Can you guess how many employees the billion dollar company Instagram has? A mere 13. Do you know how many employees work in Facebook which has a market cap of $502 billion? It is 17,408. What do you think about the number of employees working in retail giant Amazon with a market cap of $480 billion? A whopping 3,41,000. Imagine the sheer effort, investment in maintaining that number of employees. Social media companies escape these shortcomings for all they need to do is to manage a highly efficient but smaller workforce.

With a mere 13 employee workforce like Instagram, I guess there would be no need of Human Resources Department. Do you think a company like Amazon with 3,41,000 has no need of HR? Absolutely not. There should be a huge HR machinery in place to manage employees.

Internet, cloud computing and big data powering social media

              

               Imagine downloading a 5MB file using a 100 kbps dial-up internet connection. This was internet surfing was a pain in 1990s. It was in 2000 that high speed internet was buzzing in tech world. With this technology, growth of social media became easy. The average internet speed in India in recent times is 6.5 Mbps. This along with smart phone revolution has taken social media to a whole new level. Internet packs per month like 2GB per month at an inexpensive price has driven the use of social media to a whole new level. As said earlier, huge amount of investment is being made in social media marketing. 70% Facebook marketers have successfully used the site to sell their products to customers.

               The inception of cloud computing where essentially social networks are storing enormous amount of data and processing such volume of data in cloud service provider (CSP) at a way cheaper price than what it would cost to do it themselves. Users themselves provide huge market data for free via their likes and dislikes which the social networks leverage to put the ads the users would prefer the most. 

The hardships in heading social media companies

              

Big data woes: How social networks find it difficult?

               Twitter suffered a huge outage in January 2016 for over an hour and didn't recover fully throughout the day. It became over capacitated but users could access some sections of the site after two hours of failure. Experts say that Twitter had suffered similar outages before because the company's service architecture was ill-designed. This was a handicap to Twitter as it couldn't scale up. The majority of times social networks face outages is when the users use them the most like festivals, new year, support in times of natural disasters or during terror attacks. Facebook is better at providing increasing service and managing data and there is no such report of major outages. Thus service availability is a major issue which social networks have to provide in order to get the users going.

               In order to research on huge data generated by the users on various parameters to improve performance, social networks have to use big data technologies. Consider physical damage like lightning, earthquake happening to data centers in any of the availability zones which houses the data of the social networks. This would result in service outage or loss of data. Even though data replication helps social media to bounce back from this issue, the way it happens is not so desirable. Huge chunk of data is stored on multiple data centers so even if anyone data center fails, data can be recovered from a replica from another data center. The problem is the huge storage space required for all the replicas put together!

Hackers clawing through

               Social networks have also the responsibility to make their sites secure from a plethora of hackers. Hackers are online day and night trying to plant viruses, worms, bots among many others sensitive user data in social networks. Do you know that more than half of the Internet traffic is through bad bots?

               Facebook users are of victims lifejacking attacks where cybercrooks create posts that are attractive bait posts. They are also target of rogue applications. Spammed tweets, malware downloads and twitter bots plague Twitter’s operations. Besides, out of about 2000 ads, one ad would get clicked on Facebook.

The verdict

               Social media has changed the world as we know for good. A platform where you can store videos, images, interact with your friends, make money is attractive enough. On top of this, it’s all free. Social networks get free data from users and users get service. If this barter sustains, it will take social media to the next level. On the other hand, huge storage and processing required is another woe to social network owners. In the face of huge competition, these companies are under huge pressure to provide seamless service to users ensuring which they will stay ahead in the race. They also face issues related to security from hackers. They should also provide enhanced security to their users from hackers. Those social companies will prevail who feel that it is their responsibility to bring the world together on a common platform.  

Sources:

https://yourstory.com/2016/05/free-social-media-management-tools/

Author Bio:

Vaishnavi Agrawal loves pursuing excellence through writing and have a passion for technology. She has successfully managed and run personal technology magazines and websites. She currently writes for intellipaat.com, a global training company that provides e-learning and professional certification training.

The courses offered by Intellipaat address the unique needs of working professionals. She is based out of Bangalore and has an experience of 5 years in the field of content writing and blogging. Her work has been published on various sites related to Big Data Online Training, Business Intelligence, Project Management, Cloud Computing, IT, SAP, Project Management and more.