Social media has moved from the status of a “buzz word” to a strategic tool of communication. More people in the society are acquiring skills in relation to this way of communicating online (Eyrich, Monica & Kaye 412).Social media has become an important factor in the day to day activities. It is extensively used in advertising, public relations industries, political campaigning, and other several areas in the society. This essay will discuss the basic elements of social media. It will also discuss the impact of the evolution of social media in the society. These impacts are in regard to the products bought and how information is received.Consequently, it will discuss the influence that social media has on the decisions that people make.

The elements of social media are digital objects. They are different in size and type. Twitter post also known as tweets have a limitation of up to 40 characters, while email messages are only a few lines to a few paragraphs in length. The variation in sizes causes dramatic patterns of interaction.MediaWiki, gives support to six levels of headers and automatically generates a table of contents, easening the creation of large pages. Social media has developed around a significant kind of digital object. These objects include: You Tube videos, Flickr photos, bookmarks at delicious, books at Amazon, music or podcast at iTunes, TV shows at Hulu, and people at facebook.Tweet at twitter, messages at discussion forums or email lists, pages at Wikipedia, products at eBay, presentations at slideshare, 3D objects in Second life, and career professionals at LinkedIn are also some of the digital objects (Derek, Shneiderman & Smith 15).

Social media provides avenues for people to take part in presenting their identity themselves (Hana and Hendricks 4).There is a great difference between online social interactions and one on one interaction in offline social networks. They offer avenues for expressing minimal restrictions. Those that use online social networks may disclose at levels quite different than in their face-to-face conversations. The internet has improved buyer power and reduces costs, limited the barriers to entry, increased competition on a global scale and facilitated disintermediation. The Internet has made every company regardless of its location easy to enter the competitive market. The internet has made it easy and less costly to advertise and for various firms to connect with their suppliers and customers (Muller 2).People go into social media to seek information, share information and experiences. These exchanges of information and experiences between different people who could be consumers of certain products, raises likelihood of people recommending products to others and hence making it popular. This in turn increases the sales of the said product. Social media has greatly enhanced the way people think and how they act and make decisions.