Social media marketing has become a rage in the recent years and its hype is fully accounted for. It requires a complete strategy that includes tools and methodologies to research your audience, to monitor and react to the audience, to preserve and grow your personal or brand reputation, to publish content that provides value to your social network, and incorporates a promotion strategy that drives business results. If you are looking to make it big in your business, you cannot possibly stay on the social media sidelines. Here are 4 reasons why you need social media to expand your business.

1. Social Media helps you showcase your brand:

Social media not only gets a word out on your business, but it also spreads the word like forest fire, hence aiding you in building a loyal community of fans and followers who will further recommend you to their friends.

2. Social Media is cost effective:

Most social media is cheaper than traditional advertising, so you won’t have to spend a lot of money to increase and improve your reach or fan base and grow your business.

3. Social Media can improve your customer service:

Social media allows you to engage in a two-way communication with your customers and also offers a unique opportunity to step up your customer service game and provide instant gratification to your target audience by responding effectively to customer complaints, queries and compliments. Businesses that engage with customer service requests via social media earn 20-40 percent more revenue per customer, according to Bain and Company.

4. Social Media gives you accessibility:

Users of social media belong to varying ages and demographics which means you can reach out to them easier and quicker than most traditional means of advertising. More often than not, social media users are very active and will always follow up on any topic that is trending on social media.

Get busy trending, get busy branding!

J.K Rowling spawned a world full of magic and imagination with her widely celebrated series, “Harry Potter” which has engulfed children and adults alike for the past two decades. While there have been many to dismiss the series as a juvenile creation made solely for the purpose of children’s entertainment,  the underlying political ideologies in the novels have not gone unnoticed by all.    The power structures and the rebellion displayed against the dominant rulers of the magic world are comparable to the current political scenario in our world which is potentially in the hands of some power hungry tyrants and the backlash they receive from the public for their brash policy decisions.

 Voldemort, who is the main antagonist in the series, is an insatiable leader who wishes to convert the entire magical world to the dark side where he can be their authoritarian ruler. Voldemort and a majority of the magic world discriminates against various magical communities such as Half Bloods (individuals with one magical blood parent and one non-magical blood parent), elves, werewolves, giants etc. This entitled treatment which includes the prominent usage of racial slurs meted against the aforementioned downtrodden communities by Voldemort and his followers could possibly be drawn from the racism that we witness on an everyday basis in our world. A modern leader such as Trump could be compared to Voldemort for his outspoken dislike and public racist acts towards most non-white communities in the world.  

 Dolores Umbridge, a power abusing teacher in the novel, is a more realistic and hence most hated villain since she has blind regard for outdated rules that put her in a position of complete dominance over her children. When she comes to Hogwarts (the school of magic), she begins to slowly take over the reins of the school and makes everyone bend according to her wishes. The character of Umbridge bears an uncanny resemblance to Hindu nationalist politician and Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, Aditya Yoginath who also wishes to take undisputed charge over the state and its secular proceedings by slaying practices of other communities especially the Muslims.

Despite the existence of these tyrants, J.K. Rowling instils hope in her readers by showing the incessant attempts of her protagonists to carry the world to the light of justice. There are multiple failures, eg: Hermoine’s (Harry Potter’s best friend) organisation for elves’ rights which is mocked by her own best friends symbolizing unappreciated civil movements in the world.  However, as the series progresses, the characters start questioning authority, an act that Rowling practices even in real life and eventually succeed in bringing down Voldemort and his corrupt followers and freeing all those innocent prisoners captive under his rule. This is a beautiful and optimistic story that explains that organized civil disobedience against manipulative governments can lead to freedom for all the citizens who have been forcibly pushed down under that governance instead of silently suffering and swallowing orders from the authorities.

Gender wage gap has been a constant and prominent issue across various industries for multiple decades now. Thus, the U.S women’s football team, despite its consistent number one ranking, is not immune to this problem. As a result of the stark difference in the pay between the two teams, five of the biggest names of the established U.S women’s football team filed a complaint against the U.S Soccer Federation to revolt against this discrimination. Similarly, the US women’s hockey team attempted a boycott to strive for equal wages. However, the wage gap remains prevalent even today, almost discounting the protests of various women teams.

 While a few sports have been able to reduce or almost eradicate the disparity in the wage gap, most sports still display an appalling difference in the wages offered to male and female athletes. These offenders include cricket, golf, squash, tennis and the most notorious of them all, football.  To cite a few football examples, Cristiano Ronaldo, the world’s highest paid athlete is known to bag more that $88 million whereas, Alex Morgan, the highest paid female football player, has earnings of about $2.8 million. In the 2014 World Cup, the winning US women’s football team earned a substantially lesser amount ($1.8 million bonus to be distributed amongst 23 players) than the US men’s football team ($8 million to be shared amongst the players) which got kicked out before even clearing the quarter finals. Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), which is the main decider of the prize money in both the World Cups (men’s and women’s) allocated a whopping $576 million for the men’s tournament and a relatively meagre $15 million for the women’s World Cup- an amount that is almost 40 times smaller. It would be a grave mistake if the women’s team were to tolerate this injustice with their lips sealed.

Similar wage gaps are witnessed across various professional sports. In golf, New Zealand’s Lydia Ko became the youngest player of either gender to be ranked number one in 2015. However, she still pocketed less money than the golfer in position 25th in the male ranking of the PGA Tour. Men in the US Open compete for a chance to take home almost $1.5m (£1.1m), twice as much the prize money offered to the female champion. The ridiculous wage gap extends to big leagues in basketball as well, where the highest-paid player in the Women’s National Basketball Association makes roughly one-fifth that of the lowest-paid player in the Men’s National Basketball Association.

Although, there have been few initiatives such as the Grand Slams of Tennis (the four most important events in the global calendar) introduced equal pay for men and women in 2007, they have most often gotten lost in the vast sea of unequal pay for women who play the sport equally well if not better than their male counterparts. The injustice is not restricted to just the pay but also the limited amount of exposure given to these athletes, as well as the sexist comments that they have to face. We could tell ourselves that this gap is rapidly reducing across sports, but then we would be labouring under a fantastic delusion. Women have only yet touched the tip of the iceberg in terms of opportunities in sports and it’s going to take very long before we achieve equal pay for them if we continue to remain satisfied with this pace of progress.

Hutt, Rosamond. “Sport Has a Huge Gender Pay Gap – and It’s Not about to Close Soon.” World Economic Forum, http://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/09/sport-has-a-huge-gender-pay-gap-and-it-s-not-about-to-close-soon/.

Perasso, Valeria. “100 Women: Is the Gender Pay Gap in Sport Really Closing?” BBC News, BBC, 23 Oct. 2017, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-41685042.

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Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton