2. Literature Review
Social media can be a valuable addition for brand promotion if used properly. The intriguing aspect of social
media is its wide spread of usage and world-wide influence. In order to comprehend the grasp of social media, the
abundance of Internet accessibility, coupled with the benefits of retrieving and uploading information has spawned
radical changes in education, business, government and entertainment. Studies offer insight into the evolution of
usages in internet technology for numerous purposes, including Social Media. According to a report generated by
National Center for Education Statistics (2006) in the use of internet among students about two-thirds of children in
nursery school and 80 percent of kindergartners use computers, and 97 percent of students in grades 9–12 do so.
About 23 percent of children in nursery school use the Internet, and this number rises to 50 percent by grade 3 and
to 79 percent in grades 9–12. If we observe closely at the rate of evolution of social media, year 2009 the online
social networking application Facebook registered more than 175 million active users, every minute, 10 hours of
content were uploaded to the video sharing platform YouTube and, the image hosting site Flickr provided access to
over 3 billion photographs (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010). Similar growth in terms of users and information continued
in the first quarter of 2011, when Facebook recorded an increase of 79 million users, going from 585 to over 664
million subscribers worldwide, according to Internet world stats. In the age of technical growth billions of people
use social media websites as medium to share information and connect to one another. These websites are used by
people all across the globe, providing a passage to connect different cultures. According to McLuhan & Powers,
(1989) “The process that occurs when two or more cultures or cocultures exchange messages in a manner that is
influenced by their different cultural perceptions and symbol systems, both verbal and nonverbal”. Social media has
become an indisputable means to overcome cultural barriers and connect people from different backgrounds. The
notion of a ‘network’ is based on trust and the creation of links and bonds between individuals, groups of people