Successful social media brings in lots of traffic. It act as a toolbox which contain communication, association and multimedia tools for sharing your content.

Question of use or not to use social media always occur in Business owners mind. Social media has both pros & cons in some way. So to clarify this question lets take a look at the following:

Security company FaceTime Communications has released results from a survey in which it asked over 500 IT managers and employees about their Internet and social media habits at work. The survey revealed that:

- 79% of workers use Facebook, LinkedIn or YouTube at work for business reasons, and of those business reasons, 54% cited professional networking, 52% said research, and 52% said learning about colleagues were what they used them for.
- 82% say they use social media sites for personal reasons

- 51% of workers use social networks at least once a day

- 62% said LinkedIn was their preferred network for business purposes while 55% said they prefer YouTube for personal reasons.
Based on this survey alone, there isn’t a whole lot of difference between the amount of people using social media for business reasons and those for personal ones. There is no clear cut answer to the question, “Is social media good for my business?” There are obviously pros and cons.

Pros

Networking:
From networking point of view social media is the best way to network with others. These are totally free. You do not need to pay any kind of payment for social media. If you are just launching your product in the market or trying to make famous your business, social media is a good way.

Brand:
Branding is also a good pro of social media. You can expose your brand by making your network with Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, etc. and keep your already famous brand fresh.

Early adopters:
Participants tend to be early adopters—more likely to interact with vendors and offer feedback to improve your products and services. This is a significant, way to make relationships with others. This is an impressive and powerful way for building relationships with targeted audiences. Versatile way to make internal and external communities.

Cons

Time: Social media need time for frequent updation and monitoring of content. You have to spend precious hours on a networking or marketing strategy that may or may not give good results.

Decrease in productivity: This is also noted as a con of social media. The problem is, there isn’t really a tangible way to measure the amount of productivity reached by these efforts. ROI is not immediate and direct. Just like it is hard to measure brand awareness.

Social media by its very nature is individually oriented and not company oriented. It’s often hard to distinguish if an employee using social media like Facebook or LinkedIn is in actuality promoting herself instead of the company. How should a company manage employees directed to utilize social media in the company’s interests? It is a difficult question to answer but one that must be answered if social media is to go mainstream with business.

Variables

The truth is, there are a number of variables that come into play when deciding if social media has a place in your workplace. First off, who is using it? The positive/negative impact it can have is likely to depend on the role of the employee who is using it.

Which social networks/sites are being used? I’m not going to favor one or the other, but depending on what type of business you are in or what your goals are, Twitter might be more useful than YouTube, or vice versa. Different networks have different elements as well. For example, you may find commenting on a MySpace blog to be of some use, but also find that messaging “friends” does little to help you achieve your goals (again - or vice versa).

Apart from that, social networking is great thing.

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