Data collected by The Nielsen Company found that in December 2009, global consumers spent more than five and half hours on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter (Nielsen, 2010). This is an increase of 82%, from the same time in 2008 (Nielsen, 2010). With this increase of consumer use of social networking sites, business has seen this as an opportunity to use sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube for their needs. Some of these opportunities include “sales, marketing, recruitment, research, and technical support” (Wilson, 2009). This paper will look at how social networking sites are used by business.
