The good and bad about social media | SocialExcerpts

The good and bad about social media Jan 03

There are two sides to every coin. One bright and the other one is slightly darker.  Social media is not an exception. If you are a pro social media user, you might not agree with the aforementioned statement. You would say, social media is a wonderful medium of communication with the like-minded people and an equally good marketing tool. Yes, but as they say “good things do not come easy. The road is lined with pitfalls”, so is true for social media as a technology.

Let’s find out what the good aspects of social media are and how they can turn into menaces for individuals and organizations alike.

It’s transparent

Social media is an open platform, where you track updates by others very easily. This feature can add to your profile a good deal of zing, which would be visible to the World Wide Web users. You can easily spread your thoughts and opinions across through different social channels.

But it might not work for you, if you deliberately want to hide some updates from the outside world. Say for example, you have uploaded a photo of yours along with your friends on Facebook, where you were drunk. After a couple of days, you may want to remove the photo from your profile. But chances are that many of your friends (and foes) might have downloaded the snap just to  embarrass you.

Its reach is wider

Social media, largely based on web 2.0 technologies, encompasses anything and everything that includes a two-way conversation format. Be it a tweet or FB status, or a blog comment or forum mention, social media regulars can easily find updates by you and for you. This is beneficial if you want to reach to a wider mass for sharing your ideas or thoughts.

But the same feature can turn you down, if there is a negative buzz about you. It can reach further beyond your thinking. Moreover, there are tools (like Google Alerts), which can highlight your web footprints to anybody.

It’s fast

According to Mashable, Twitter receives more than 50 million tweets a day. Amazing, isn’t it? You might perceive this as a platform for so much interactions and knowledge sharing activities. Wait! Have you ever thought, in this entire hustle bustle, chances are that your updates might not reach even half of the people of your network. Unless you can establish yourself as an influencer on social media, you cannot get your content across all the channels all the time.

Secondly, this is a major drawback in handling negative word-of-mouth. Social media is so fast that one update can fire within a few seconds. Now, this is good if the update is positive, but worse in case of a negative comment.

Deletion is always an option, but only for your satisfaction. When we are on social media, posts can still be found on cache, even if we delete them. You can block some people, who you don’t want to see your updates. But you cannot do this on every channel. So, your last resort should be to be very sure of the updates, before pressing the share button.

On a transparent platform like social media, knowing what to say is easy, but knowing what not to say is tricky.

So are you ready to jump into the bandwagon?

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