A few years ago, the internet was just being invented and started gaining popularity and now the time has come where we cannot even live without being connected to the Internet. This has been the norm for almost all inventions over time.
For hundreds and thousands of years, people continue to live without them but once they become a part of our lives, it becomes almost impossible to live without them if, for some reason, we are not able to have access to it.
The advent of social media has taken everyone by storm. On-demand video streaming has taken over traditional tv. Livestreaming has been made widely available for any content creators.
Whether you want to or not, you have to become part of some social media platform in form or another. And in the current world of the pandemic where we are encouraged to stay at home, all our business, educational, and daily activities are somehow connected with social media.
Where social media offers a plethora of benefits, there could be a dark side to everything. In this article, we will describe some of the pros and cons of social media so one can be vigilant in avoiding the negative aspects of it and try to experience only the positive ones.
Pros Of Social Media
The advantages of social media are manifold and we will list the most important ones here:
- One of the major advantages of social media is that it allows you to connect with anyone across the globe by just clicking a few buttons. Both of you just have to share a common social media platform and can get easily connected with each other in minimum time. You do not even need a computer for this purpose now; your smartphone can easily do this job.
- You can easily carry out meetings with many people by just sending one invitation and it will reach each one instantly. There is no problem with the logistics of how each member will reach the venue; everyone can simply login into their accounts and attend the virtual meeting while sitting from their homes.
- In the pandemic, social media platforms have served as a community and workplace where people can work from the comfort and safety of their homes without having to come together. Social media was one of the main reasons that so many people could easily stay home to work and stay safe in this pandemic.
- Social media provides you with the opportunity to make a name for yourself without waiting for someone else to do it for you. In the conventional world for example, if you are a writer, you have to wait for a publisher to publish your content. On social media, you can just publish your content yourself and get the opportunity to be noticed by many people around you.
- Social media provides you with a great opportunity to market your products and services. Through social media marketing, you can promote your products or services on various platforms and websites. You can easily connect with your audience, interact with them, build your brand, increase sales, and drive website traffic.
- Through social media, businesses can reach out to the right target audience. Conventionally for advertising, you would have to hire an advertising agency, create TV commercials, or advertise on billboards. Now with social media, you can just put your ads on Facebook,or livestreams, and let them appear to your target audience. Thus with minimum effort, you can immediately reach your audience.
- Through social media, any news can reach you much faster as compared to conventional methods. In case of a crisis near you, you can mark yourself safe in different social media platforms where your loved ones can see that you are safe which will save them from the anxiety of not knowing in time.
- Of course, one of the main advantages of social media is that it enables you to kill time or pass boredom through a huge array of fun activities and content. You can find any sort of information that you are interested in on social media and connect to people with similar inclinations.
- Social media can serve as a great platform to learn and improve your knowledge regarding any topic of your choice. People offer virtual courses and activities that you can register yourself with. This enables you to learn new skills and technologies while sitting in your home so you can use those skills later.
Cons Of Social Media
Where there are many great advantages of social media, it comes with some disadvantages as well which we should try to avoid. These include the following:
- Social media can become addictive for many individuals where we just go and open an app without having any particular need to do so. The apps just make you repeatedly use that platform because you feel the urge to go back again and again. This can lead us to waste precious time which we may have used to do some productive activity.
- The addictiveness of social media makes us want to keep checking our mobiles even at night before sleeping. This causes our brain to remain so active that many of us have difficulty falling asleep or enjoying a good night’s sleep. This can cause insomnia in some people while in others, it can lead to such poor sleep that we feel drained and fatigued the next day and are unable to function according to our full potential and productivity.
- Social media can lead to a feeling of decreased self-esteem and self-worth. Notice how many times you see people posting only about their good and expensive things and experiences. Compare that with them posting anything bad going on in their life which will be basically non-existent. This “all-good” approach of posts can cause others to think about their problems in life causing them to become depressed and disturbed without thinking that everyone has some bad going on in their lives, they just don’t tell the whole world about it.
- Where social media is a great source of information about different topics and subjects, the information needs to be verified authentically as much of the information can be unreliable. Usually, people fail to determine the authenticity of some information which can lead them to not only believe in that wrong information but pass it on to others as well.
- Social media can cause privacy issues for everyone. You add so much of your personal information to different social media apps. But you do not know how your information is stored and how someone could access it and try to manipulate it. People can create fake IDs of other people and you can never know how anyone can try to impersonate you.
- Social media can become the cause of different kinds of frauds and scams. Scammers can gain information about you from your social media profiles, contact you under a false name, and scam you to make an illegal transaction before you could find out about the fraud that you have been through.
These are some of the pros and cons of social media. Each thing has its own set of advantages and disadvantages. We need to be aware of them so we can benefit from their advantages and try to avoid the disadvantages.
Apart from social media marketing services, VIA Media also provides professional videography services, photography services and interior photography services.
We seek to help our clients grow organically through video marketing. From filming to video editing, we got it all covered. Contact us today to find out more and get a custom quote.
