Social Media: Benefits And Challenges

What are the benefits of social media?

Social media provides several benefits, including the following:

• User visibility. Social platforms let people easily communicate and exchange ideas or content.
• Business and product marketing. These platforms enable businesses to quickly publicize their products and services to a broad audience. Businesses can also use social media to maintain a following and test new markets. In some cases, the content created on social media is the product.
• Audience building. Social media helps entrepreneurs and artists build an audience for their work. In some cases, social media has eliminated the need for a distributor, because anyone can upload their content and transact business online. For example, an amateur musician can post a song on Facebook, get instant visibility among their network of friends, who in turn share it on their networks.

What are the challenges of social media?

Social media can also pose challenges to individual users, in the following ways:

• Mental health issues. Overuse of social apps can result in burnout, social media addiction and other issues.
• Polarization. Individuals can end up in filter bubbles. They create the illusion of open discourse when the user is actually sequestered in an algorithmically generated online community.
• Disinformation. Polarized environments foster the spread of disinformation where the perpetrator's intent is to deceive others with false information.

Businesses face similar and unique social media challenges.

• Offensive posts. Conversations on intranets and enterprise collaboration tools can veer off into non-work-related subjects. When that happens, there is potential for co-workers to disagree or be offended. Controlling such conversations and filtering for offensive content can be difficult.
• Security and retention. Traditional data security and retention policies may not work with the features available in collaboration tools. This can raise security risks and compliance issues that companies must deal with.
• Productivity concerns. Social interaction, whether online or in person, is distracting and can affect employees' productivity.

What are enterprise social media best practices?

It is important for companies to have a social media strategy and establish social media goals. These help to build trust, educate their target audience and create brand awareness. They also enable real people to find and learn about a business.

Here are some social media social media best practices for companies to follow:

• Establish social media policies that set expectations for appropriate employee social behavior. These policies should also ensure social media posts do not expose the company to legal problems or public embarrassment. Guidelines should include directives for when an employee must identify them self as a company representative and rules for what type of information can be shared.
• Focus on platforms geared to B2B marketing, such as Twitter and LinkedIn.
• Put in place an engaging, customer-centric strategy in social media campaigns. An example would be to use Twitter to field questions from customers.
• Include rich media, such as pictures and video, in content to make it more compelling and appealing to users.
• Use social media analytics tools to measure user engagement with content and to keep on top of trends.
• Use a conversational voice in posts that comes across as professional but not rigid.
• Shorten long form content to make it social friendly. Lists and audio and video snippets are examples.
• Embrace employees and customers talking positively about the organization and repost that content.
• Check in on analytics and management tools frequently, if not on a daily basis, as well as the social media accounts.

Source: https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/social-media

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Tags: Social Media, Tech Tips