Forget a Raise: I Want Access to My Facebook!

My, how times have changed. It used to be that people looking for a job were naturally concerned about how much they would be paid, but also what the opportunities were for long-term employment. It was just a generation ago that many people entering the workforce fully expected to complete their entire career within the same organisation, with the expectation of retiring with a nice pension. In today’s fast-moving world, it appears that today’s youth has different priorities. Armed with their latest mobile devices, such as slim smartphones and highly evolved tablets, they have different priorities when looking for job. They want unfettered access to the social media sites.

Are friends more important than work?

Cisco, the telecommunications and networking giant, recently did a survey of over 3000 college students who are about to graduate, basically to get a sense of what they were thinking about, in terms of their future careers. As it turns out, over one third of those surveyed indicated that their ability to access their social media accounts at work whenever they wanted was far more important than their salary. About half said that if they were offered a job at a company that denied access to social media sites during work hours, they would most likely turn the job offer down. Is the ability to stay in touch with friends and relatives during work hours that important to today’s youth? Absolutely. Over two thirds of the respondents indicated that they planned on asking about a company’s social media access policies directly during the job interview. The results of the survey clearly indicate where the priorities of today’s youth are placed.

Adapting to a New Reality

While the job market continues to show lackluster growth at best, companies always want to be able to attract the best and brightest if they can. As a result, they are beginning to understand the importance of instituting a fairly liberal social media policy during work hours. In the same survey, 40% of those that had recently been employed stated that they had been convinced to accept the job because of the fairly liberal policies regarding social media that were in effect. For companies, there is also another potential competitive advantage to allowing fairly unfettered access to social media. As e-commerce grows in popularity around the world, various social media platforms become excellent avenues to market one’s products. Having young, social media conscious workers on staff, can provide a company with inexpensive but extremely useful information about some of the latest and most popular social media sites that the company might consider focusing on.

Making Social Media Work for You

There are a lot of surveys out there which indicate how rapidly e-commerce is growing, especially now that so many consumers have the ability to access information from their mobile devices. Any company that wants to remain competitive has to have a social media marketing plan in place, or risk losing out to their better prepared competition. Hiring a highly specialised company such as facebookmarketing.biz can provide you with all the expertise you need to make your social media strategy a complete success.

image courtesy of: freedigitalphotos.net panupong1982