Social Media - The Good, the Bad and the Ugly


 
It took me a long time to figure out how I was going to use social media.
I don't mean how to set up an account, post, tweet and comment but how I was going to justify using social media and make sure I benefited from it as much as possible.
Some may be surprised to hear that I thought so deeply about it. After all, social media is fun to use and a lot of people simply use it to communicate in whatever way Twitter, Instagram, Facebook etc  dictates and don't think any more of it whether that be through pictures or a 140 character limit.
 
Communicating
However, I see social media, just like communicating with someone face-to-face as a reciprocal process. But, it can be much more dangerous than talking in person.
With one comment, post, tweet you can potentially communicate with an innumerable amount of people so it's vital  to make sure whatever your message, you convey it in the way you intended. Also,  you have to be ready to face reading messages you would rather not see from trolls, haters, or just criticisers but because everyone can see their comments they're a hundred times more impactful.
 
Permanency
That leads me on to the permanency of social media. If you do make a wrong move or if someone else communicates with you in a way you don't like, it can potentially stay in cyberspace forever. Even if words can be deleted, as long as they were published they no doubt would have been seen by loads of people already.
 
It's Public
Of course putting restrictions on your account can help. That's my next point, social media is the ultimate public form of communication. Of course, privacy restrictions help make it a bit more... private. Still, for some weird reason social media's default formatting and everything else about it always encourages being as public as possible.
With publicity comes issues that only once celebrities had to worry about. Inevitably, people competing, comparing, abusing, and unfortunately a lot of narcissistic, self-centred behaviour.
 
 
Here are my tips for using social media:
1. Decide if you really need it. If you do, how will you use it? For a business, as a hobby but publicly, or for personal use privately
2. If for  business purposes choose which social media platform is best. Not all are necessary for all businesses
3.  If you have multiple uses for social media, keep your public and private profiles seperate
4. Allocate a specific time in the day to manage your social media and stick to it - it can easily become addictive
5. Be careful what information you put on social media especially if it's a public account - unfortunately stalkers, trolls and criminals feed off this info.

Comments

Popular Posts