The Era of Antisocial Social Media

Websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and even LinkedIn have completely changed ways of interaction and perceiving information. The true meaning of social media is continuously changing. They started with the selling point for you to communicate with other people. Social media have also grown to become effective tools for business promotion. 

On social media, we all have our different identities. That is our profile where we can do whatever you want like uploading a picture you like, sharing our thoughts, letting others know our happy moment, raising voices against any crime we see, and many other possibilities.  When we are content with our profile, it becomes our identity to the world. Also, the more our content is loved, the more we find our profiles successful in the antisocial world of social media. From every website of social media, we can find a way to connect with other members on the same platform either by text or call because all they are made to engage the audience for a few more seconds which turns out into minutes or even hours of the audience.  Another main function of these websites is to share pictures and other information privately or publicly.

Is social media making us anti-social?

The teenage way of living has completely changed from what it was just twenty years ago. Now there is a dramatic decrease in face to face communication.  This may be the biggest reason for this generation’s inability to interact with others on the level of speaking. Let’s start with the disadvantages first because the advantages are numerous and everything seems to have a positive impact unless it is used negatively. 

Disadvantages of social media

Cyberbullying 

Most of the children become a victim of cyberbullying sooner or later.  Anyone can create a fake account and threaten anyone else with their issues because the victim can’t identify the other person. Threats can be in the form of texts, pictures, and even videos. Sometimes cyberbullying becomes a very dangerous situation for the victims. It can be started negative comments on the victims pictures or harassing through private messages.  There are a lot of cases where cyberbullying stories have tragically turned into suicide stories. And it's not always easy to track the perpetrators down.  They can be unknown strangers using fake accounts to hide themselves.

Cause for Security Issue:

Social media is a threat to privacy. If you use social media, your privacy is in your hand. Most people use social media for daily updating about their life to feel validation, but it unbeknownst to them dissolves their privacy. Hackers use malicious apps, spyware, viruses, and could penetrate your system using information gained through social media.  While it’s not easy to pass a virus through Facebook, it can be done through other apps which are used to post on these sites. You can not expect to become secure using online tools, as there is always a way, and privacy is just a myth on the internet. 

Decreasing in face to face communication skill

As we spend lots of time on social media, we are being more and more introverted.  If we are placed in front of other people, our thinking capacity gets off, and we barely can keep our words in public. Although we may be super extroverted in our social media profiles, we struggle to keep the same energy in real life. From a young age, people who start using these platforms have common traces of social anxiety. They feel the breaking of their comfort zone while communicating face to face. 

Social Media are Great for Spreading Alternative Facts

False news is always attention-seeking in nature. Slanted, clickbait headlines give false news manufacturers the advantage of getting a larger audience. The larger the audience is, the more clicks and ad revenue the false news accumulates as it spreads.  Social media is the greatest breeding ground for it. Sometimes it becomes really difficult to identify the fake news because everyone seems to spread the same news and if we get the same fake news with the different relevant sources it gives us a sense that it must be true news. We all have experienced false information being  spread like free giveaways, suspicious website redirecting, diet or supplement sites branded to look like news sites, and many additional examples.

Social Media Can Ruin Reputation

If you hold a larger audience, then one wrong post on your profile may ruin your reputation on social media. It has the power to shape your reputation. Sometimes it happens with businesses, irrelevant fake stories ruin a reputation on social media due to which businesses in the real world collapse. A lot of companies have lost their sales due to these problems such as fake reviews or misconstrued information. 

Addiction to Social Media

From children to elderly persons, many have suffered social media addiction. We can easily find people around us bending their necks down and looking at their phones, scrolling and scrolling. This is because social media are becoming more addictive than just a communicating tool, we can find a packet of pleasures in an instant, just by opening our phones. A lot of parents give phones to their children because they think they can get free time if their children are busy on the phone.  But they ignore the fact these devices have a great negative impact. Every teenager and young adult seems super active on these websites to create their identity in the online world

Wasting Time

Some precious hours of our life every day are being wasted on social media, getting nothing  in return but for short pleasure, which inevitably turns into anxiety or depression. Our precious hours in which we can learn something or spend quality time with our family maintaining or building relationships gets eaten up entertaining strangers.  We don’t take time for life offline as it doesn’t give us instant pleasure. We keep wasting our time seeking happiness on someone’s post or comment which doesn’t make a real difference in our offline lives. It is badly affecting youth as generations are becoming less and less active in real life but more and more on the online world, which gives them a sense of fulfillment for a short period.

Advantages of Social Media

From a business perspective, social media is the biggest opportunity. 

Reach to Large Audience

There are millions of people using social media platforms and it's a great opportunity to reach them.  Through content, we can choose our audience base and can generate good income prospects through marketing.  Even if we need a larger audience, we can get them through paid promotions at a very low price. With increasing the watch time on social media it’s become easy for people to catch the vision of your advertisement. The more attention-grabbing your visuals are, the more you can traffic you can drive.  If your ad adds value to the audience they are definitely going to go for it. 

Direct Connection with Audience

With business tools on social media, getting in contact has become very easy.  Just by using chatbots, a lot of audience turns in to consumers.  The more we make a relationship with our audience, the more they convert into customers. With a larger audience and direct connection with the audience, social media becomes a very powerful tool that can be used either for good or bad work. 

You Can build Your Brand

Start solving problems on any of the social media websites, you will build an audience, and establishing your brand just with organic content and little understanding of social media.  We can easily create a brand on social media from scratch and even you can turn into a social media celebrity.  Social media gives the power to every phone to create a brand or an influencer. 

You Can Drive Traffic to Your Website

It’s really hard for new websites to get traffic because they are new and unknown to the world. But where there is social media, there is millions of potential traffic, people seeking  content and your website may be precisely the content for them.  You can easily convert your social media traffic to your website traffic and you can even evaluate the performance of your traffic like what is the conversion rate, how much time your audience spends, or even compare with a previous report.

Regardless of the business perspective, social media has also been the main reason for bringing people together throughout the globe. We can learn about different cultures, and communicate with different people in different places. Altogether it’s become a great tool for communication and for business. But the excess of using it from an early age has a bad impact on mental health. It's in our hands how we choose to use social media.

Abishek R. Nepal

https://www.upwork.com/freelancers/~01d9cfd8269dadb318