Paul Ayuk|10 June 2017
Social media as we know is the norm of today. Everyone can be found there! Your old friends, Your colleagues, family members, your crush (lol) and your Business clients.
With this said, it poses a great opportunity for us as individuals and corporate entities alike to be able to reach our friends/family and clients therefore making us happy by helping us spread our message and meet potential customers that may later translate to financial gain.
However with this great opportunity in view we face a great challenge both negative and positive. Some NEGATIVE EFFECTS are:
*SOCIAL MEDIA can become ADDICTIVE therefore causing us to waste most of our time online going through the endless feeds on our walls; it has also been proven overtime to lower the motivational level of people, especially teenagers and students.
*SOCIAL MEDIA can lead to a Compromise of our SECURITY: Most of the content we share online gives insights to many thing about us like: our habits, likes/dislikes, places we've been or are and also people we know therefore giving malicious users a peak into our private lives (more on security in a future post).
*SOCIAL MEDIA can lead to a FALSE SENSE OF CONNECTION: Most people get on connecting with strangers on social media and therefore overtime it has become difficult to distinguish between real world relationships and virtual dates.
According to researches, when more energy is focused on these less meaningful relationships it weakens the real ones.
Some POSITIVE EFFECTS are:
*PROFESSIONAL NETWORKING: Social Media can help us meet our customers and other industry professionals thereby fostering better relationships with businesses and reducing the barriers involved in meeting certain figures physically.
*KEEPING IN TOUCH WITH FRIENDS AND FAMILY: Social media can easily help us connect with our friends and family who are separated by location etc.
*VIRTUAL MEETING POINTS: Social media’s have reduced the barriers of communication to a great deal therefore giving us a guaranteed spot whenever we want to communicate with colleagues who are not physically present.
*UP-TO-DATE INFORMATION: Social media can keep us up to date with happening around the world and most importantly our immediate environment.
UNITY: Social media can unite people on a huge platform for the achievement of a specific goal. Which can lead to positive change in society.
In view of all that has been said SOCIAL MEDIA can help us achieve a whole lot and also lose a lot, however to maximize our usage of social media we must all:
1. Have a Social media plan (individual and businesses)
2. Limit the amount of personal information we share.
3. Be careful of the kind of people we connect with on social media.
4. Limit the number of social networks we use.
5. Decrease the amount of time we spend online.
Paul Ayuk
Is a professional ICT Developer & Digital Marketer.
He can be followed on—
Twitter: @paulayukk and
Instagram: @ayukpaul
