The importance of Social Media
Social media is not a place only to stay in touch with your friends but a place for everything that is happening at that moment. During the riots, Twitter and Facebook could be used as alternative news sources, and when your mobile phone isn’t working, I would check your network’s Twitter page in case it is not only your phone. By using social media many companies keep their customers loyal to them. For example, recently I was admiring EDF’s customer service chat, which solved my electricity bill problem in minutes without any queuing or holding music. On Twitter, I got a response from them that they were happy to hear that I loved it. It was a small thing that did not require much but made me want to stay with them because I felt like I was appreciated as a customer and that they were easy to contact in case I ever needed to. Twitter opened an entirely new news platform for millions. Social media gets to places that cameramen and reporters don’t. The value of social media as a source of information is colossal. We use it to find out how our friends are doing and all the latest gossip about the situation in Egypt during the protests against President Hosni Mubarak’s too-long 30-year rule. People tweeted, Facebooked, and YouTubed about it, and the world got a broader picture of the situation than they would have gotten from just a news reporter. There is a reason why China is blocking social media sites whenever they hit the nerve of the Chinese government. Social media increases everything good in the West; freedom of speech, freedom of economic competition, individualism, and democracy—it doesn’t work well with corruption and tyranny. Now that people have got their hands on social media, there is no going back. Everyone just needs to hop on and embrace the ride. Whether you are an individual, a company, or a country, tighten your seatbelts because it is only going to get wilder. We have had many inventions in history that changed the world; social media is one of them.