Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter have improved their values from mere friends’ connections to promoters and marketers of businesses which have proved to be very effective. For instance, the selling of the banner spaces has been used for marketing some companies on these sites. What one needs to do is to find out who are the targets for his or her products and services. After doing this, advertisements are done on banner space given by a social networking site like Facebook. This has proved to be effective since there are millions of people visiting these sites, and once you advertise on these sites, there is a high probability of that advertisement being seen by many people, and the result is that you get new customers coming to check your site. Polls have also been used in these sites, which enable businesspeople to rate their products and services in terms of quality. The effects of these sites on the business environment are both positive and negative. Social networking is considered as the principal medium of educating customers about certain products and also doing marketing.
The negative side of it is that it minimizes productivity in a company. For instance, when employees get addicted to these sites, they spend much of their time chatting with friends. The other thing is a misuse of the internet, which eventually increases the cost of internet services in that company. It can also cause invasion of the privacy of the company and also is an entry point of spyware and viruses. Web 2.0 revolution technology has enabled businesses and also users to collaborate on the internet, for instance, video conferencing, which is real-time. The other capabilities of Web 2.0 technology are sharing information and making it possible to write applications that can run without problem on any platform. With the surfacing of the Web 3.0 revolution, we expect to be able to do cloud computing.