Leveraging Social Media (Communications & Media Essay)

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Leveraging Social Media
Technological advancement particularly over the turn of the 21st Century has given companies a major reprieve in establishing new methods for their growth and eventual expansion plans. Part of this plan involves a curated application of social media (SM) in the company’s daily operations. SM is a cheap yet effective approach in reaching the greatest number of people among the intended audience (Siljanovska 83). The same concept applies to the needs and functions of the human resource department (HRD) whereby effective communications have become a strategic necessity rather than a strategic tool in the department’s leadership. The growth in SM and more so in relevance to the number of users offers companies an avenue through which they can hire people to help them in specific tasks. In essence, SM provides massive advantages to many companies in guaranteeing efficient and productive results from their HRD.
There are a couple of ways that SM can prove to be fundamental in promoting effective communication from the HRD. A platform such as Facebook is a primal example where organizations can issue frequent communications about open enrollment deadlines as well as impending deadlines. The availability of a company’s Facebook page implies that there is a direct link between the management and the workforce. Also, employees are asked to disseminate the message to their colleagues. From another perspective, the current pandemic highlights the growing importance of being projected towards working from home. Even before, people had begun taking this approach taking into account the much convenience it offered them. They save transport costs and more importantly, time that would be wasted in traveling to and from work including being in traffic. In retrospect, SM is vital in ensuring that these individuals remain in the loop of whatever is going on at the firm. This approach enables the accomplishment of training sessions through platforms such as Meerkat and Periscope (Kluemper, Mitra, and Wang 181). Here, employees can watch streaming videos where they remain acquainted with their employers’ needs. Using YouTube adds another aspect that may lack in others in that viewers can save various videos to view them later. The third method of looking at the essence of SM in HRM is knowledge management. At times, employees are oblivious of how valuable the information they have is important to the business. SM ensures that employees share and increase knowledge at their disposal (Yates and Paquette 6). Eventually, they have an opportunity to advance organizational performance. Nevertheless, this goal is the ultimate organizational objective.
Crowdsourcing is another concept that has gained much applause over the years. The simplest definition is the one that Grier offers. He argues that is “is a means of organizing and coordinating the labor of individual human beings. You use the Internet and computer software to contact individuals, offer them things to do, and collect the results of their work” (Grier 10). This process comes in handy for the HRD as it helps in the achievement of specific, yet crucial goals. Th...