Social media platforms play a huge role in the current time we live in. The platform not only helps in passing time but offers an end number of benefits as well. Frankly speaking, it has become impossible to live without it, especially for the current generation. But, have you wondered about the pros and cons of using social media? Well, this blog enlightens you on the advantages and disadvantages of social media platforms.
We are living in a digital world, where social media has become a part of our daily routine. Social media has drastically changed the way people used to communicate. As each and everyone have created their accounts on social media platforms, communication between them has become common these days.
Whether it is Facebook, Instagram, or X – communication became much easier with others through these platforms. Of course, not only is there the revolution of communication factor, but there are also many other benefits of social media, such as building connections, engaging in discussions, and sharing opinions.
Social media has a great deal of influence and impact on people’s lives, whether it is good or bad. People share everything on this platform like a whole new world, especially the current youth. Also, many small businesses highly benefit from social media as it is easier to reach target customers. All sorts of promotions, offers, giveaways, and special news can be shared merely with a few clicks, and it is a great way to reach a wider audience. Moreover, when it comes to alerting the public in response to major societal issues, there are no other platforms like social media to reach out to people.
Like the coin having two sides, social media platforms do have pros and cons as well. In other words, such a social life has resulted in advantages and disadvantages since its use in recent years. Through this blog, we will discuss the 10 advantages and disadvantages of using social media in the current period.
What Are The 12 Advantages of Social Media?
- Fundraising and Charity Purposes
- Online Promotion and Advertising
- Connect with People
- Keeping Updated with Information
- Educational Benefits
- Boost Organic Traffic to the Website
- Building your Brand
- Reach A Larger Audience
- Entertainment Platform
- Shaping Governance and Public Awareness
- Finding Jobs
- Supporting Social Causes and Public Awareness
1. Fundraising and Charities
One of the best merits of using social media is that it can be a platform to aid an individual or group. Many communities flourish through social media, and people can join them to express and discuss their problems or struggles. People will not feel left out as they get a chance to reach out to people who feel the same.
They can talk about their problems and the people in the community can help them with counseling, or financial assistance. Many charity profiles are presented as well on social media so that people can take a step ahead to do a good cause or use the platform to get help. There are communities that primarily focus on societal concerns. With the help of social media, it became less complicated to approach a large audience to solve their difficulties and help their lives be much more peaceful and happier.
2. Online promotion and advertising
Online marketing has never been this easy. Social media has made it very easy to connect with a larger audience as the entire world is now connected. They can share their business products or services, and with the right social media algorithms, it becomes simple to reach out to a wider audience.
Online or offline, the business needs to promote and advertise its products or services to get customers, which is a crucial factor in the survival of the business. With social media, this becomes much easier than the ordinary way. You can simply ask people with great followers to share the products or the profile to reach many audiences, and businesses can approach paid online advertising as well.
Marketing with influencers is a real trend in online platforms. Collaborating with social media influencers gets the attention of their followers, and sharing the content makes it easier to reach the targeted customers.
3. Connect with New People
The main purpose of social media platforms is to connect with people. You can connect with anyone whom you wish to connect with from anywhere in the world. You will be able to make friends with anyone you wish to, and others will also try to connect you with a follow request or through direct messaging.
Connecting has a lot of advantages such as making friends, job seeking, getting reviews or pieces of information, exchanging ideas, and much more. The primary purpose of all the social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, and Twitter, is to connect with people all across the globe.
More than connecting people by sending and accepting follow-up requests, connecting goes more with socialising with people who could have the same interests as you. From talking with people from various backgrounds and sending messages to any of your schoolmates with whom you’d lost contact, connecting can be made possible and exciting with social media platforms.
4.Staying Informed with the Latest News
Another advantage of social media is that it helps to stay up to date with daily information. There are many profiles that focus on offering the latest news and information. By simply browsing through social media platforms, you will be enlightened about current affairs.
Through social media, many people also share pieces of great information such as general knowledge, history, views on politics, digital currency, religious information, different country’s culture, and many more from which you can gain great sources of knowledge.
By sources of knowledge in social media, we mean people and pages that are professionally devoted to covering certain topics above. Every topics are discussed very differently so that even the common people can understand its significance. Thus, people will be having opinions by reading those articles and news.
5. Educational Benefits
During the Covid pandemic, several schools and colleges had initiated online classes. Now, many teachers and professors use this platform to teach students using interesting learning approaches. Online classes are much more inclusive than traditional offline classes, as they provide the opportunity to learn from anywhere around the globe or in the comfort of your home. Social media platforms like YouTube have a ton of educational content in diverse areas. The advantages of these are that people can self-learn and prepare for exams without spending a hefty amount of money. Education is made open and free to anyone with access to a phone and an internet connection.
It becomes easier for students to clear their doubts, or to gain an understanding of the concept in an appealing and interactive way. They now have choices, if they want to learn about something, there are many professionals who are willing to teach them either with payment or free of charge.
6. Boost Organic Traffic to the Website
If you have any kind of website such as business, blogging, medical, health, fitness, educational, etc., using social media platforms is the ideal way to boost organic traffic to your website. You can approach many people with a large audience to share your content to reach out to the wider audience.
You can also create a profile of your own and create quality content to reach millions of people. You can even link your website address in the bio of your social media profile, making it easier for people to access your website and share it with their friends.
7. Building your Interest Area
Social media makes it easy in building people’s interests and talents. People from all over the world use social media from which your posts get exposure. You can gain loyal fans and also generate leads if you aim to nourish your interest into business through social media. Even if you are a small business or start-up, you can gain better exposure and there are many influencers who take a step ahead to support small businesses by creating valuable posts that can gain better exposure.
If you are someone who has a particular interest in anything such as painting, crafting, or even cleaning and organizing- social media platforms are an ideal place to share your interest and make a living out of it. You can explore into platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Medium that may also help you monetise your works.
8. Reach a Larger Audience
Another great advantage of social media is it helps to reach a larger audience to a great extent. People all over the world are connected to social media and a good viral post is enough to reach all these people.
There are thousands of people across the world who might be interested in your business, and fortunately, with social media, it is simple to contact. Any account on social media platforms has the opportunity to connect and reach a larger audience where they can align their ideas with the trends. It is also possible to focus on the target audience based on a specific place and many more options are available to reach out to millions of people. This enables companies to use social media platforms to interact with their audience, collect feedbacks, and answer their queries.
Making a piece of content reachable to a larger audience is beneficial for both the business and other professional accounts. Collaborations, thus, work perfectly in social media platforms so that barriers and differences between people can be eradicated simultaneously.
9. Entertainment Platform
Majority of people use social media to pass their time. People love to share and see pictures and videos of themselves with others. Many of the users broadcast their talent on social media such as acting, dancing, writing, and cooking, etc. through posts and the audience can give compliments and remarks under their posts. As social beings, people love to communicate with others with the similar or different interests and share their opinion in comments or through posts/stories.
Since social media has developed into a new society, the platforms have gradually transformed into places where entertainment is possible. There are a lot of live programs on several platforms where people can attend them without thinking about the city they are in. For example, there is an online fan base for the music band BTS and any of the fans ever leave its live programs. Likewise, there are stand-up comedians and other entertainment shows whose programs are made available on social media.
In today’s digital space, we have separate platforms where we can enjoy our time singing, editing videos, watching movies and dramas, writing, and so on, which enable us to explore our personal space in our interest.
10. Shaping Governance and Public Awareness
Social media can be a perfect platform for the Government to communicate to a larger audience. It serves as the page through which people can rely, interact, and trust the posts. Thus, it adds legitimacy to the posts and ideas they share, which has become a core part of today’s governance.
Governments can raise public awareness on these platforms as everybody uses social media applications. The Government can also use these platforms to gather information on public behaviors and trends, which can help develop crime prevention strategies.
11. Finding Jobs
With social media, finding job opportunities has also become an easy task. When applying for jobs, you may have come to know about platforms like LinkedIn and Indeed. Indeed is an application you can apply for job openings in the desired locations. The same goes for LinkedIn, the only difference is that you can connect with people with different job roles and engage with them like Instagram.
Platforms like LinkedIn are used to connect with recruiters and find job opportunities. Several companies post job vacancies on their social media pages. Social media benefits recruiters by helping them find candidates and job seekers by helping them find their ideal jobs.
These platforms have options to add your skills, certifications, and sample works, helping you search for jobs with the added details. You can even choose the job type and role to make your job-seeking less complicated. Especially on LinkedIn, you can create posts on how you aspire to become a marketer, analyst, or writer like that.
12. Supporting Social Causes and Public Awareness
Last but not least, social media has been an environment for running campaigns for establishing societal justice around aspects like women’s protection, unjust norms, and empowering the people from their causes. Global issues are also discussed among people who are not afraid to express their feelings about the issue. Thus, the issue gets exposure to how people get into discussions and decide to stay for a particular opinion. There are campaigns going on for economic crises, environmental hazards, etc as with people’s opinions, policies too get analysed and decided by the government authorities.
What are the 12 Disadvantages of Social Media Platforms?
Now that we dug deeper into the advantages of social media let us look into its disadvantages.
- Cyberbullying
- Reduces face-to-face Communication
- Fake News
- Health Issues
- Risk of Data being Misused
- People get Addicted
- Causes Distraction in Daily Routines
- Lack of Sleep
- No Productivity and Waste of Time
- Causes of Depression and Loneliness
- Invasion of Privacy
- Social media usage among children.
1. Cyberbullying
The worst aspect of social media is Bullying through social media platforms is called cyberbullying and it became so common these days that it has badly affected many people’s lives. So many people including kids, teens and even adults, have become victims of cyberbullying.
Some people really took advantage of the anonymity factor that social media offers by bullying through online platforms. By creating a fake profile, it becomes almost impossible to trace the person. They bully others by insulting them with pictures or videos and mocking them on public platforms.
Through social media platforms, bullying became so much easier. Anyone with a public profile can experience this, especially teenagers. Bullying can cause severe anxiety, depression, high levels of stress, and high suicide among people.
2. Reduces face-to-face Communication
Social media platforms reduced the ability of individuals to communicate face-to-face. Since the majority of people use social media platforms as a means of communication, it started to get weird for some people to have a real face-to-face conversation and they do anything to avoid it.
Typing through the keyboard or to an extent sending a voice message became a comfortable mode of communication, especially for the current generation. Social media platforms made it difficult to casually have a conversation with people around directly. Studies show that it can cause an increased chance of getting affected by bipolar or other mental sufferings.
3. Fake News
Social media platforms are filled with various news and information. But most of them are fake news created by anonymous users. Fake news circulates rapidly across social media platforms and it becomes quite hard to believe which information is right and which one is not.
Unethical people create fake news on numerous hot topics and send it to groups or different individuals who further reshare the post, making it easier to spread fake news. People do not need verification before posting news or any content on social media which is why there is much fake news spreading through these platforms.
4. Health Issues
Another major demerit of social media is that spending too much time on it can result in developing various health issues. People become inactive by spending too much of their time, day and night, holding onto their devices and scrolling through social media.
They lay in one place, lazy to even make body movements such as going for a walk or to participate in any activities. This can cause them to gain body weight and exposes them to numerous harmful illness.
5. Risk of Data being Misused
One of the major cons of social media is hacking. There are many hackers who keep their eyes on to certain profile to grab out the private information. Studies show that hackers target mainly youths and children.
They hack and hijack certain accounts and blackmail the person by claiming to share their private information with the public. Hacking became highly common with social media. Even though it is an illegal act, there have been several cases reported by people on their accounts getting hacked. It’s better to note that there’s a two-step authentication in every social media platform that can prevent cyber attacks by locking any stranger’s entry to your account.
There is fear among people whose accounts have got hacked and imitates your identity gradually.
6. People Get Addicted
Social media causes people to get addicted. Many people lost the ability to walk into society and have a conversation and chat directly. They spend almost all their time scrolling through social media. An addicted person is at risk of several health issues.
Continuous blue light exposure and getting too involved in the digital world while cutting real-world interaction are the worst aspects of social media.
7. Causes Distraction in Daily Routines
Social media platforms are the main source of distraction these days. Starting from early in the morning, people tend to check their social media platforms rather than finishing off their daily routines. People began to procrastinate things more mainly because they started becoming lazy after excessively using social media.
Using everything in a minimal way doesn’t cause any harm. Scrolling and using social media as the only source of fun and time pass can cause so much distraction in your life activities.
8. Lack of Sleep
Using social media excessively can cause sleep trouble. People get addicted to social media platforms and spend so much of their time scrolling through social media.
This can cause damage to sleep cells and cause trouble sleeping mainly for teenagers. Lack of sleep cause many health issues and other severe disorders.
9. No Productivity and Waste of Time
Some people use social media for productive uses but some of them use the platforms just to kill time. They lose the desire to become productive and instead waste so much of their precious time on social media.
The current youth spend so much of their time on social media rather than doing something productive and this is another major drawback of social media platforms.
10. Causes of Depression and Loneliness
Studies show that people who spend too much time on social media platforms might get depressed or lonely. Spending excessive time on social media and using it as the only platform for communication make them rely on it so much.
They lose the tendency to have a real face-to-face conversation or take an initiative in talking to a person which makes them feel lonely. Too much time on social media causes headaches, stress, and anxiety as well.
11.Data Breaches
In recent years, there have been controversies surrounding data breaches by companies like Meta. These companies collect the personal information of social media users and share it with third parties for advertisement purposes. Most often, this personal information is collected without the user’s consent. Social media users have to be careful about the digital footprint they leave behind, as this information can be vulnerable to exploitation by others. Personal information can also be used by people committing identity theft. As a social media user, keep your data protected, especially when you are logged into the device. For example, Instagram does have an option not to save the logging into the websites that they can particularly use for advertising.
12. Social media usage among children
Social media platforms usually prohibit child users; however, many young children access these platforms without parental supervision. If left unmonitored, they can expose themselves to inappropriate content on these platforms, which can harm their mental well-being. In addition to these, there could possibly be child predators on these platforms, making it unsafe for children. With the popularity of online classes, children have started using digital devices with an internet connection, which can also be used to access social media. Hence, it is necessary to keep an eye on children using these platforms.
Balancing Excessive Use of Social Media
Finding the balance between its advantages and disadvantages is crucial in our modern lifestyle. We have already discussed both sides of social media usage, and finding the right balance is the right choice. Understanding the signs of overuse is crucial before taking the necessary steps.
- Spending more time on social media than intended.
- Neglecting responsibilities and personal relationships
- Feeling anxious or depressed after using social media
- Having difficulty concentrating on things outside of social media
Set Clear Goals
Limiting yourself is the first step to controlling any addiction, which will eventually help to find the balance.
- Use social media only during specific times, such as lunch breaks or after dinner
- Limit total daily usage, apps that monitor screen time can help in setting and conditioning to these limits
- Use social media with purpose and avoid seamless scrolling
Engage in Digital Detoxes
Finding alternatives to digital dependence is inevitable in finding a new life. Make sure you are including digital detoxing activities in your daily life.
- Designate tech-free zones, spend time with family and friends, find fun in socializing without social media.
- Use social media to improve your real-world relationships, not replace them
- Consider longer breaks from social media during holidays or weekends and spend time in activities like reading, exercise or travelling.
Find Meaningful Connections
Focusing on quality over quantity in social connections can help you get better benefits from social media.
- Always prioritising quality over quantity in social connections can make your usage productive and meaningful
- Use social media to enhance real-world connections instead of replacing them.
- Participate in meaningful communities that align with your personality and interests.
Concluding
The above-mentioned are some of the pros and cons of social media platforms. If used for a good purpose or for a productive purpose, it can be a platform that enriches you with great benefits. Too much usage of social media can be really harmful mentally and physically. A person is prone to various health issues and severe disorders if they spend too much of their time scrolling through social media platforms.
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What measures should be taken to protect our privacy on social media?
Being aware of what personal information you share and how you customize the settings affects your privacy. Make sure you avoid clicking on suspicious links, regularly review and update security settings etc. in social media life
Can social media positively impact career development?
Yes, social media can help you grow your career by offering networking opportunities, access to job listings, and resources for career advancement. Following successful personalities in your areas of interest can help you find your own path to career development.
How to stop spreading misinformation on social media?
Platforms have introduced strong policies regarding fake information, employed fact-checkers, and used AI to identify the spread of fake news. Users are encouraged and responsible for reporting misleading content.
What roles do social media play in education?
Utilising social media for sharing resources and improving collaboration became popular among students after the pandemic of 2020. They also offer platforms for educational institutions to share updates and engage with students.
How can all businesses utilise social media for their growth?
Businesses can use social media for growth in several ways. Some steps include improving brand awareness, engaging with customers, providing customer service, understanding customer preferences, etc. Consult online marketing experts to implement social media promotion to your business effectively.
