The small business column with Kehlan Kirwan

In this week’s column, Kehlan Kirwan looks at the power of social media in business, and why online communities have started to become more powerful than the platforms themselves.    

In recent years we, as a business community, have become quite enamoured with social media. So much so, that you begin to wonder how social it can be to interact more with a smartphone than with other people.

But, in recent years there has been a powerful shift in social media from the individual to the collective. Facebook is filled with groups who are coming together under a one-page banner. Twitter provides the ease of hashtags in which people can put their views across to collectives by tagging onto the conversation.