1. Advantages And Disadvantages Of Social Media Recruitment

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.The Advantages and Disadvantages of Social Media in a Job Search Executive Summary In recent years, the amount of people with access to the internet has grown immensely. This has caused an enormous boom in people using social media. Top 5 Advantages and Disadvantages of Social Media Marketing When social media first came into being, no one knew the impact it would create on the society. The fact that it is a platform of conversation and sharing of information, it can be used to market brands through services offered.

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If the goal for a business is to reach customers where they are, a social media presence seems necessary. For a small business, engaging with consumers on at least one social media platform, offers an opportunity to promote your goods or services without a large monetary investment via traditional marketing channels. However, that same presence can be the source of other conflicts, if not managed properly.

The Challenge of Picking Platforms

Several years ago, the idea of social media marketing was mostly limited to Facebook and Twitter. In recent years, this type of marketing has expanded to include popular sites such as Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube and Tumblr. This glut of social media choices means that there is an opportunity for almost any small business to be able to connect with customers.

However, finding an finding advantage means limiting your efforts to the sites that best suit your business. Research social media platforms to determine which sites have the greatest number of users in your key demographic and which provide the best choices to promote your product.

Establishing an Effective Presence

Have an eye-catching design business? Consider photo driven social media, such as Pinterest and Instagram. Are you an expert on carpentry with a gift for gab? Crafting YouTube tutorials or DIY videos for Facebook could be your best choices. By finding early on what works, you reduce your chances of encountering one of the largest disadvantages that social media marketing offers – a heavy time investment for minimal returns.

It is important to view returns as something beyond direct, immediate sales. A primary advantage of social media is that it provides access to these opportunities, but it also allows you to establish yourself as a leader in your industry, and a destination for a certain type of goods. Measure your engagement by considering likes, re-pins, retweets, thumbs up or comments as successes alongside leads or direct conversions.

Control Over Your Advertising Spend

While spending money is rarely an advantage, advertising on social media provides you with a great deal of control over the target audience for your advertising dollars. Like traditional media ads, you can tailor social media advertising to a target age group, location and income range, but you can take it a step further by narrowing based on specific likes or dislikes of consumers.

Inspirational product marketers can target an add to Christians or self-help fans while a craft brand may target women who like Martha Stewart or Rachel Ray. The disadvantage of this is indirect exclusion. By targeting an extremely niche market, you limit your exposure to a larger audience that may find value in your products or services. To get the best of both worlds, test different ad groupings and measure your results.

Pros and Cons of Customer Interaction

Interacting with customers on social media is great, except when it isn't. A social media presence lets you build your brand with consumers on a daily basis. By sharing content, answering questions and responding to problems you create a business persona that can build a loyal fan and customer base, but downsides also exist.

A customer service problem can turn nasty in a Twitter exchange, a Facebook ad may attract a handful of trolls who harass your fans and an employee could share an inappropriate meme on your brand page. All of these hypothetical situations happen daily on social media, and, at some point, you will need to put out virtual fires for your business.

Facing an Ever-changing Landscape

The biggest disadvantage to social media marketing is the ever-changing landscape. MySpace was the place to be in the early 2000s, but now it's a distant memory. Today's popular sites may not be well-known tomorrow. As the market changes, social media requires businesses to pivot, and as each site implements new policies. In 2018, the announcement of a Facebook algorithm change shook the marketing world — fewer posts from pages or brands would show up in a user's news feed.

The best-laid plans of viral posts and content calendars could not change the fact that less content and fewer posts would surface for customers. There is no way for a business to control this, which makes examining the returns of social media marketing extremely important when determining if it is a net advantage for your business.

About the Author

Ashley Adams-Mott has 12 years of small business management experience and has covered personal finance, career and small business topics since 2009. She is a full-time government and public safety reporter and holds a BSBA in accounting from Columbia College. Her work has appeared online with USA Today, The Nest, The Motley Fool, and Yahoo! Finance.

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Small business owners need to assess the potential negative effects of social media in the workplace, before placing employees in front of a computer that has unlimited internet access. Social media's negative effects on productivity can lead to a loss of revenue, while widespread use of social networks for internal communications makes the loss of sensitive company data a distinct possibility. Before hiring a worker who must use the internet for work, draft a social media policy that addresses your primary concerns and then add to it, as needed.

Social Media Policies

A company's social media policy extends beyond using social media within the office, and it should contain guidelines for how employees should comport themselves online. In some industries, such as journalism or politics, policies are more restrictive and require workers to limit opinion-based statements or discussion of brands and community figures. Others place limitations on discussion of the business and an employee's position. Assess your field and any concerns, such as customer privacy or employee behavior, when drafting your policy, and include guidelines for workers to use when sharing information regarding your business online. After you have drafted a full policy, ask a lawyer to review it to ensure that the document does not violate any employee rights and is fully enforceable when problems with social media in the workplace pop up.

Social Media - Negative Effects on Productivity

Employees who constantly refresh Facebook, send tweets on Twitter every few hours and watch Instagram stories several times a day aren't working to their fullest potential; this is one of the primary disadvantages of social media in the workplace. While many justify using social media as a mental break, the networks can pull a user in and keep them for longer than the standard 15-minute break twice a day. A Harvard Business Review study also suggests that workers who use social media at work are more likely to cultivate the connections they would need to move on to their next job, even though they are at your site, working on the clock.

To limit social media use at work, block access to unnecessary sites from your computers. While workers will retain access to their profiles using their own personal devices such as smartphones, excessive employee use of their own devices will be more evident. For workers who require access to social media for their job, discuss during orientation the parameters of using these social media sites, and establish clear goals for their time, such as answering customer messages, scheduling corporate content or cataloguing consumer chatter.

Personal Issues Become Work Problems

When coworkers communicate with each other using social media networks during business hours, it becomes possible that personal issues may bubble over into the workplace. For example, Pam may post a political meme that Bill doesn't like. If Bill comments negatively, then a heated discussion could follow, which then becomes an in-person conflict that management must resolve. A personal post to friends and family about a health problem could be circulated throughout the office, despite concerns over employee privacy.

Business Communication Tools

Limiting use of Facebook or Twitter at work doesn't mean preventing employees from sharing information online in a secure, professional setting. For example, Facebook offers a Workplace site that enables workers to communicate independently of their personal profiles, keeping home and work separate. Other solutions, such as Trello, Slack or Skype also enable workers to manage projects and share information - for business and for fun - while also keeping management in the loop and ready to moderate. Business solutions also help keep your proprietary information, such as marketing plans and discussions of annual goals and sales figures, in a secure location.

Advantages And Disadvantages Of Social Media Recruitment

About the Author

Ashley Adams-Mott has 12 years of small business management experience and has covered personal finance, career and small business topics since 2009. She is a full-time government and public safety reporter and holds a BSBA in accounting from Columbia College. Her work has appeared online with USA Today, The Nest, The Motley Fool, and Yahoo! Finance.

Choose Citation Style