Social Media: Why?

Thursday, August 23rd, was the first day of my Social Media class at ONU. Having never fully understanding the social media buzz that was going on I was, and still am, a little nervous about what the class might entail. However, being optimistic, hopefully this class helps me to see what social media has to offer, and helps me figure out what it entails.

People have been telling me for years how amazing Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook are, and even though I have gotten a few social media accounts, I hardly ever use them. See, I tend to focus on the weaknesses of the sites rather than the strengths and opportunities that they hold.

Strengths

Looking closer at the strengths, social media does keep people in better contact with each other. It is easier for companies to reach their targeted audiences to get out any information they wish to pass along. It is also a great networking tool for both a person's professional life as well as their personal life.

According to PR Scoup, there are strengths and weaknesses to almost every social media site out there. Including the fact that it is a direct line to the target audience, it allows for immediate feedback, and it allows for a lot more traffic. Even with all the strengths, I still tend to focus on the weaknesses.

Weaknesses

Beirut posted some advantages and disadvantages to social media on their blog. Some of the disadvantages included it sometimes being more time consuming to keep up with social media sites, it having a negative effect on worker productivity, and having a companies mistakes online reaching a bigger audience and having a bigger impact.

However, that post tends to focus more on the business side of social media, so it is forgetting one of my biggest pet peeves. People who feel the need to let everyone know what they are doing ALL the time.

That can be a HUGE weakness because over sharing, both personally and in the business world, can make people not care about the message being put out because they're so use to seeing multiple updates on their news feeds from the same source. Also, over sharing could lead to people focusing on an unrelated topic rather than focusing on the topic at hand. But if over sharing is not part of the equation, there are quite a few opportunities available to people who know how to correctly use social media sites.

Opportunities

With social media, there are many opportunities out there, particularly for companies looking to reach specific targeted audiences. Most of the strengths of social media are also opportunities. Building off of the strength that social media directly connects a company to it's audience, that means that a company has the opportunity to reach the audience and get there feedback almost instantly. This is great for customer service purposes, particularly because most clients are part of a younger generation that uses social media. A business doesn't want to be stuck in the past and become "old-fashioned".

 


(Yea, don't be like them.)

I remember when I was contemplating which internship to take and was looking at one of the companies website and was astounded at how well they handled comments. If a customer had issues they addressed it in a timely manner and then people's complaints turned into compliments. To me, that is absolutely amazing and makes the company look really good to clients.

Threats

Even with addressing things in a timely matter, social media also has some potential risks involved. For example, if a company doesn't handle the situation well it might be too late to fix it because information in social media spreads like wild fire. Also, the threat that I personally find the biggest problem, both professionally and personally, is over sharing on social media sites. I understand businesses want to make the public feel involved sometimes, but even if your business is small, sites should still be conducted in a professional manner; unless you really expect to go no where with your business (harsh, but true).



It's easy to tell that as of right now, I'm not that good with social media. Maybe it's because I'm ignorant of the capabilities it holds. Maybe it's because I've had bad experiences with social media sites and technology in the past. However, maybe it's because I see how many things could go wrong, and have seen many people make those mistakes. It might also be because sometimes I'm a bit old-fashioned, or some people are just stupid, but whatever the reason, this semester is going to be interesting. Hopefully, I learn to love social media, since I'm going to have to deal a lot with it for my career path.