CDES Blog Update #3 - Social Media and Relationships

Where do you see social media influencing relationships? Is it a good thing?

I see social media influencing most relationship aspects, from personal, friendship, and work/school related. Facebook in particular, where you can update your relationship status and it even includes a link to the other person's profile. Facebook originally had "Single" and "In a Relationship" as options, but it has since spread to include many other options. There is the option to include who your family members are on Facebook, and quite a few people (including myself) have included very close friends as family member such as "Brother" or "Sister". Social media allows you to keep up with your friends and possibly family as well. Is it a good thing? Yes and no. It can be good to help keep in touch with someone a long distance away, or who is very busy. It can help if you lose people's phone numbers or help you to reconnect with friends from a time before the use of social media.
It can also break down relationships as well. You may see a bunch of pictures posted from all of your friends at an event you weren't invited to, or someone you don't know may tag your significant other in a post about "Having a great time at dinner." You may receive pressure from a boyfriend/girlfriend to share your password so they have access to your account, or maybe to them you aren't tagging them or posting pictures of them enough, etc.

Social media, I believe, can be used effectively to build relationships as well. You can start an event on a social media site and invite people to it, or send out group invitations. You can join groups with other people who share like minded ideas or hobbies with you. Some social media sites can separate your friends into groups such as "High School Friends" so that you can more easily keep in contact or share certain information with a certain group of people. It can help to hold together long distance relationships, such as sharing pictures or videos with friends or loved ones in a different state, or even outside the country.

Participation in social media can help strengthen relationships in a chosen field or profession as well. Your company may have it's own social media sites. You could upload pictures you took at the company picnic to their site for other employees to share and view. With so many different groups on Facebook and Twitter, you could receive all sorts of updates and information regarding your profession. This gives companies providing a product almost free advertising, and directly to their target audience as well. I follow a company called Infinite Labs, who sells workout and fitness supplements as well as clothing and other fitness related items. With the use of social media, a company can strengthen the ties with its customer base, using it to announce a new product, use comments and posts on their page as feedback on a product, promote giveaways and discounts in a fashion that is easy to stay updated upon for an individual who does not visit the company's website on a frequent basis. Most social media sites have mobile apps as well, and these mobile apps most often have alerts you can set when a chosen person or page posts something. This provides an almost immediate update to a target audience, something impossible to do with tv, radio and print adds, and for almost no cost.