Pros & Cons of Social Media

 Pros

·      Criminal prosecution because of social media

The NYC police department began using Twitter back in 2011 to track criminals foolish enough to brag about their crimes online. When the Vancouver Canucks lost the Stanley Cup in 2011, their Vancouver fans took to the streets and rioted, but local authorities used social media to track and tag the people involved, and they caught people who were stealing during the riot.

·      Social networking creates new social connections

Statistics show that 70% of adults have used social media sites to connect with relatives in other states, and 57% of teens have reported making new friendships on social media sites.

·      Students are doing better in school

This is an interesting statistic about the pros and cons of social media and its effect on students doing well in school. Students with internet access at a rate of 50% have reported using social networking sites to discuss school work, and another 59% talk about instructive topics.

·      Better quality of life

If you want to talk about the pros and cons of social media, take a close look at all the support groups on Facebook. Members of these groups discuss their health conditions, share important information, and resources relevant to their conditions while creating strong support networks.

·      Social media as a source of employment

Job sourcing has gone modern thanks to social media. Sites such as LinkedIn are a major resource that 89% of job recruiters take advantage of when looking to hire potential employees.

Cons

·      Social media and the news

Much of the news information that people read about comes from social media websites, and that figure estimate is around 27.8 %. This figure ranks just under print newspapers at 28.8%, greater than radio’s figure of 18.8% and far outpaces the figure for other print publications at just 6%.

·      People spending too much time on social media sites have lower academic grades

Here is another argument about the pros and cons of social media as it pertains to students. Statistics show that pupils using social media too often tend to have GPA’s of 3.06 compared to GPA’s of 3.82 for pupils who don’t use social media.

An even scarier fact is that students who use social media tend to score 20 % lower on their test scores then their counterparts.

·      Social media sites to blame for lost productivity

Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are a direct cause for lost productivity at the workplace. In a survey 36 % of people said that social networking was the biggest waste of time in comparison to activities like fantasy football, shopping, and watching television.

Does Facebook Really Make Us Happy?

            Facebook, as we all know, is an extremely easy tool for connecting with friends and family all over the world.  Communication has become so much quicker and continual with the advent of social media platforms, such as Facebook; however, paying too much attention to your Facebook friends' updates could be bad for your mental health, according to a new study published by the University of Missouri.  Constantly scrolling through your news feed and looking at your friends’ posts has actually made many users experience feelings of depression or envy.  As a college student, I can see how this could especially affect young adults around my age because we are continuously bombarded by images of our partying, attending events, traveling and more.

            When we log onto Facebook, it is hard to avoid comparing ourselves to others when scrolling through the newsfeed.  For the majority of Facebook users, and social media users in general, we carefully craft our posts so that they showcase only the positive events in our lives.   We are able to fully control the ways in which we are perceived online and our posts may not often reflect a true representation of who we are or what is going on in our lives.  Human beings always enjoy sharing a good story, and when we post on Facebook it is almost like we are writing a positive narrative of our lives.

            The constant stream of positive posts from our friends can certainly make us feel bad about ourselves.   On Facebook and other social media platforms, it seems as though everything is wonderful for everyone else and all of their lives are amazing.  Although there are some people who express feelings of anger or misery in posts on Facebook, such as complaints about the horrible morning commute, most of us tend to share positive posts.  We all witness the declarations of love and happiness on peoples’ anniversaries, pictures of happy couples and giggling babies, and snapshots of friends on expensive vacations.   Sometimes it is hard for us not to consistently compare ourselves to others.

            Although it is easier said than done, for those of us who tend to linger on Facebook and look at the “wonderful” lives of our friends, it is important to try and put blinders on while viewing these posts.   Our Facebook newsfeed from friends has distorted our view of reality. We constantly encounter a steady drip of friends posting their adventures and this makes us feel like we are missing out on something.  It is important to remember that what we see are just pleasant snapshots of peoples’ lives, and not the entire picture.

Top Ways to Market Online

Search Engine Optimization: SEO is the process of increasing your website’s visibility in search engine’s organic results through optimizing your pages with the keyword phrases people are likely to search for.

SEO can be a time-consuming process initially, but it’s an important step towards getting more traffic and grabbing a top spot in search engines for your main keyword phrases. If you haven’t already optimized your website for search engines, it might take several months to see significant results with SEO.

Social Media: Create a free Facebook group for customers or prospects to get help or support with a problem related to your niche.

Blogging: Blogging about the content of your business or work helps to bring more market to your website.

Retargeting: Retargeting ads work by placing a tracking cookie on each of your visitor’s computers. Then, when they leave your site, they start seeing ads to come back.

Pay per click: Use PPC Internet advertising to bring in traffic to your website from search engines like Google. Here’s how it works: you pay a fixed price for every click your ad gets in the search engine, and your ultimate goal of the click is to convert that user in order to see a return on investment.

Google AdWords: Google’s advertising program, is a very effective way to get your website listed on search engines for your desired search terms. It can be very effective particularly in the short term while you work on improving your organic rank in the free listings.

Content Marketing: Content marketing i.e. producing and distributing quality content that is relevant to your audience is one of the most effective ways to market your business and attract customers. This form of marketing is also highly targeted. If done correctly, content marketing can prove a very valuable asset to your marketing strategy.