Social Media are interactive platforms that permit the generation or sharing/ exchange of ideas, interests, thoughts, and various types of social content through social networks and virtual communities. Social Media are a set of platforms, which allows people to create an online presence and interact with each other in the form of various communication tools such as blogs, message boards, forums, online chats, video conferencing, and social networking sites. Social Media can refer to any or a combination of these tools and can also refer to specific types of mediums, such as text, audio, video, images, RSS feeds, hyperlinks, icons, avatars, and user profiles.

Social Media include all sorts of internet-based content such as text, audio, video, images, podcasts, websites, user profiles, blogs, images, photos, discussions, group chat rooms, peer-to-peer file sharing applications, media player software, online games, online shopping services, RSS feeds, and social networking websites. The most popular social media across all these categories has over 500 million users and growing by the day. The most important advantage of Social Media is that they allow quick and easy sharing of information amongst millions of users across the globe. The most important disadvantage of Social Media is that it takes time for contents to propagate throughout the world.

Social Media include a number of social networking sites like: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, FourSquare, and StumbleUpon. Facebook is the largest Social Media site with almost a hundred million monthly active users. On the other hand, Twitter boasts of having almost ten billion daily active users. With almost one billion users and a huge fan base, Social Media are definitely paving way for future expansion and success of e-commerce business.

In today’s competitive market environment, Social Media are becoming an integral part of every e-commerce business, whether small or big. As a matter of fact, Social Media have become such an essential part of our everyday life, that no other marketing techniques can compete with them for providing online businesses with consistent sales. According to research, Social Media platforms are believed to result in a seven to twenty percent increase in sales and an approximate twenty percent increase in gross profit. Therefore, Social Media can be considered as one of the most important factors for generating consistent sales in the day to day operations of e-commerce business.

One of the great things about social media marketing is its user friendly platform and very easy to use. One doesn’t need any technical skills to operate social media platforms. Apart from this, social media allows the users to interact with their friends and communities and also share files and documents wirelessly. So, this makes social media marketing more of an enjoyable experience rather than a job.

Social media platforms have a large community with which people can interact, build relationships, and share their opinions about various subjects. These open forums provide ideal platform for creating brand awareness about your product. If you manage to create online visibility for your products in these platforms through effective ad campaigns, you will certainly witness a marked increase in your traffic and in sales. However, it’s not always easy to create effective ad campaigns on these platforms and this is where social media networks become very handy.