Social Networking
Introduction
A social networking service is a connected facility, platform, or site that concentrates on assisting the creation of social links or social affairs among individuals who, for instance, share interests, events, backgrounds, or everyday contacts. Examples of websites mainly used for socializing consist of Facebook and MySpace. The social networking platforms may let organizations increase communication and efficiency by distributing information among diverse groups of workers in a more efficient method, resulting in increased output. Although social networking services may increase productivity of an individual or an organization, it may also face setbacks and benefits.
Advantages of social networking
Social networking is essential because it ensures easy facilitation of open message among employees and organizations, which leads to enhanced information detection and delivery. This helps organization in accessing vital information about competitors and creation of appropriate actions that will tackle the rival firms (Partridge 23).
Similarly, social networking allows staffs to deliberate on crucial business issues without wasting economical time moving. This facilitates sharing of ideas, news, making inquiries and passing of instructions to junior staffs. Organizations can easily supervise and co-ordinate activities of departments by keeping them updates on current and future issues that affect their affairs (Ryan 75).
Social networking offers opportunities, which enable organizations and employees to increase their business contacts through constant dealings. This is due to the actuality that social networks offers access to numerous avenues of online transactions. Since business transactions are nowadays conducted through internet interactions, it prudent that promotion strategies embrace services offered via social networking. This implies that an organization will increase audience coverage for their products, making it a valuable and operational recruitment tool reaching a diverse audience and staff (Partridge 31).
As a promotion tool, social networking improves a business appearance and customer base through limited application of expensive advertisements. A straightforward advert can reach several clients within a short time; hence making it a preferred medium for publicity. This will expand market exploration, execute marketing operations and distribute communications and direct concerned people to some websites (Partridge 33).
According to Ryan (65), social networking can deliver opportunities for fresh relationships as well as establishing existing contacts. It is essential to be cautious when workers are getting involved in accessible social interactions, but it is also suitable to inspire positive associations through various possibilities, including the Internet.
Lastly, social networking is continuously evolving; employees can become conversant with innovative and emerging skills and increase their media knowledge through experience to many online types and media shared by their regulars. This will put reinforce employee competitive abilities in the market and increase productivity to the organization through sales and earnings (Ryan 80).
Disadvantages
Social networking needs protection from outsiders or undesirable parties in order to enjoy the various benefits. However, challenges are always evident if correct measures are not in place. For instance, social networking encourages exploitation and abuse from clients and staffs. This may arise due to technological and online fraud that comes with technology and other innovations. This implies that while many people practice it for good, ethical, and suitable reasons, there are also numerous who exploit it to misuse and abuse others, mostly developing firms. The accessibility brought by the network has led offenders to understand that executing their trade is informal and not hazardous online. This is mostly through the use of counterfeit identities, which makes it tricky for the law breakers to be handled by authorities or affected organizations (Partridge 38).
Another demerit of social networking is that impact the networking sites on the behaviour of employees is alarming. The misuse and abuse of technology attracts indecent behaviours among the employees and clients and can produce poor relationships. For instance, there is the trend to follow to what is popular without considering whether it is right for the development of the organization or wrong (Engdahl 116).
Engdahl (118) asserts that social networking can also contribute to health conditions since social media is responsible for developing traditional communication. However, social networking is always attractive and can contribute to wastage of production time if employees are not controlled on the number of sites to access. This is due to the reality that people who use social interaction sites for their regular communication are addicted to a point that they abandon economic tasks, especially their regular responsibilities.
Privacy is a common issue since most social interaction sites require that the operator offer personal statistics such as a full name. This detail is on the internet and easy to admission by everyone who visits the site. Although selected social networking sites do provide privacy settings so that the manager can regulate who can access the information, this does not mean the statistics delivered on the user’s page is secure (Engdahl 123).
Conclusion
Social networking is an emerging trend that offers companies and individuals with the leverage to interact freely with others online. It facilitates users to share concepts, activities, procedures, and interests within their different networks. This conveys several benefits to the users such as extensive publicity platform, employee sharing of ideas, convenience and cheap medium of supervision. However, social networking can also expose users to some challenges, which entail privacy issues, health conditions, addiction or exploitation from other users.
Cited Works
Engdahl, Sylvia. Online Social Networking. Farmington Hills, MI: Greenhaven Press, 2007.
Print.
Partridge, Kenneth. Social Networking. New York: H.W. Wilson, 2011.
Print.
Ryan, Peter K. Social networking. New York: Rosen Central, 2011. Print.
