Social media may be a dynamic tool that facilitates online relationships.

Social media
involves natural and public conversations between people on interesting topics. this is about
sharing information and sometimes involves making decisions. Social media involves several
online social channels (or network sites) and should change over time; this is participatory
and the audience (user) is a component of the creative process of real-time content creation or
real-time conversation. The study also explains that social media is a web or electronic media
that facilitates participation, openness, conversation, community and online user interaction.
The essence of social media as explained in the undeniable fact that users can have individual
profiles and personal photos, users can convey thoughts, feelings, interests (music, hobbies,
preferences) and links to profiles (friends or professional fan pages). Thus, social media
facilitates the exchange of data via email, chat rooms, blogs, discussion forums, digital audio,
photos and movies. Social media should be seen as a marketing tool and resource because it
provides marketers with access to valuable information that influences relationships build and
maintain a user feedback circuit. Social media marketing may be a relatively inferior type of
marketing and allows companies to interact in direct and end-user relationships. Social media
marketing is about the brand’s genuine interests, emotions and expressions. Thus, social
networks provide marketers ’tools to know how people interact and interact with each other,
and therefore the value of building relationships (The New Horizon Report, 2008). Thus,
social media has promoted consumer communication to consumers and has allowed users and
creators to interact with each other thus enabling relationships. The importance of this
expansion of mass communication is that social media has enabled us to expand things as the
environment changes so that social media marketing plays an increasingly important role in
marketing (Mayfield, 2011). the web and social media have created an alternative online
community for consumers (Cuming, 2008). The age of technology has made the market more
accessible to consumers and therefore marketing is no longer a business function, this is how
to run a business and reach the end customers (McKenna, 1991). Thus, social media
marketing provides an opportunity for marketers to present their brand to consumers in a non-
traditional and artistic way in real time and companies that integrate social media elements
into their marketing mix will have a greater chance of influencing consumer purchasing
choices. accessible virtual markets allow marketers to influence consumers. Users then
influence each other. In a matter of hours and minutes people can access information on
social networking sites and communicate with contacts around the world about the latest
news, natural disasters and other interesting topics (Mayfield, 2011). Therefore, knowledge
management and knowledge sharing through social media marketing is very important for
how organizations conduct business activities (The New Horizon Report, 2008). Internet
communities, blogs and social networks are becoming part of the lifestyle of buyers. These
features facilitate communication, feedback and interaction between users. These features
further encourage sharing and commenting of data and allow users to use links, resources and
more.
These social media platforms are defined as follows:
 Facebook: this is often a social network site which allows people to create personal
sites and hook up with and communicate with friends;
 LinkedIn: LinkedIn in most popularly referred to as the “grown up” social network.
This social media platform allows users to create professional relationships in online
environments;
 Blogs: These are online journals which permit participants to share their thoughts via
journal entries. Blogs often allow other users to discuss journal entries; • Twitter: this
 is often a sort of micro blogging where small amounts of content or updates are
uploaded online through mobile networks;
 YouTube: this is often a site that permits users to upload and share videos with fellow
community members.