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The future of social networks
By Abdullah Mahgram
A 2012 report released by McKinsey Global Institute mentioned social networks are just getting started. However, it will contribute to the global economy between 900 billion dollars and trillion dollars. This figure shows the (important) role of social networks in the upcoming years. How will this affect the economy? And how it will affects wages, supply, demand and many other aspects?
Today social network users number approximately 1.47 billion and in 2017 the estimated total will reach 2.55 billion users. So, that means more than 25% of the global population will be connected through social networks within the next few years.
The innovation in smartphones – in the past 2 years, the number of smartphone owners has rocketed to 814 million worldwide. That enables theses users to access social networks frequently. This one of main factors that driving change.
The changes will reach every aspect of our life from rising awareness to spreading breaking news and variety of jobs and things to do between them. For instance Businesses in different industries realized that targeting their consumers through social networks is more efficient than the traditional advertising method (TV's, Radio, newspapers … etc.) therefore companies increased advertising budgets in social network. This is what figures tell us from the top 10 companies advertising in social networks which spend more than 7 billion dollars. So, this shows that social networking roles are expanding or have expanded from connecting people to shifting roles and changing traditional key players. However economically these changes will affect the labor market by increasing jobs opportunities in new jobs related to social networks in different professions and of course a decline in traditional jobs. Also the changes in social networks in present affecting recruitments
process by shifting roles from traditional method (head hunting) to social network. For instance in
USA 80% of the companies use social networks as their first port of call (first choice) when searching for new staff and these changes in the labor market will affect the global labour market.
Marketing&Advertising Expert