Lack of Anonymity You are putting out information about your name, location, age, gender, and many other types of information that you may not want to let others know. Most people would say be careful, but no one can be certain at any given time. As long as people can know who you exactly are, then some can find ways to do you in.
Scams and Harassment There is a potential for failure of security in both personal and business context. While many sites apply certain measures to keep any of these cases of harassment, cyber-stalking, online scams, and identity theft to an absolute minimum, you still may never know.Time Consuming If this is not your kind of thing, that it would just be a waste of time for you. The key to social networking is that it is supposed to be fun, whether you are just doing it for kicks or clicking around for business purposes.
That should be reasonable enough for anyone, but there are those people who don't see the point. For them, it can be a disadvantage. Now there is something to really think about. Nothing is without a blemish, but those of this type of networking shouldn't really be that much of a concern regarding your safety.As long as you go along without making big mistakes, then it is all good.
You can take advantage of the Internet phenomenon that continues up to this day. Once you understand the advantages and disadvantages of social networking, then you can cruise through without fail. http://www. everyday-wisdom.
com/social-networking. html Nothing has changed the Web more than the rise of social networking sites. Before social networking, the World Wide Web was full of interesting information, but there was little opportunity to contribute or participate.Today, social networking sites are fulfilling the potential of the Web: connecting people across the globe.
But why do they matter so much? "With social networks, we're able to visualize the connections between individuals, says Fred Stutzman, Ph. D. student and teaching fellow, School of Information and Library Science at UNC Chapel Hill. "Even if the value or magnitude of the connection is the same for everyone (and that doesn't mirror real life), knowing the connections between individuals helps us better understand them, who they are connected to, and how they are connected to us. "If Stutzman is right, understanding the way these networking sites work will help us understand ourselves and our friends. So read on to discover the 10 social networking sites that you should know about today.
http://news. discovery. com/tech/top-ten-social-networking-sites. html By Jonathan Strickland These days the social networking sites have become extremely popular among the youth as well as the professional people. Keeping in mind, the growing popularity of these sites and the effect it has and the benefits that it brings along, it can be easily predicted that its popularity is sure to grow much more.Some of the sites such as Friendster and MySpace are the two most popular sites that aim to build special niche for people who share common interests and passions.
Whereas social networking sites such as Twitter and LinkedIn are more professionally related and help the business men promote their businesses. However, everything has a positive and negative side. Similarly, the social networking sites are also made up of their set of pros and cons. Analyzing The Pros of social networking: The social networking websites are more like the virtual meeting places where people can just chill and hang out with friends.
They can discuss on different topics, share information, and exchange files and pictures. There are some people who use these sites as a platform to meet long lost friend and batch mates, whereas there are others for whom it becomes a bridge to meet their future love. You can either reconnect with your friends and family members or search a dating partner. Some people also use these websites to promote their blogs and services. The professional people uses this as a medium to raise their visibility, get noticed, tell about their company, service, and get more clients.By joining different communities, now people can easily know about the latest news related to that community.
You can easily get the experts advice on any challenge you may face related to their topic of interest. And the best part of this is that the advice is free. You don't need to pay a single paisa for it. Experts are always ready to give their advice and share information with you. These are just some of the several positive things that have contributed to make social networking really popular among people and spread smiles. It has made world a small pace and everyone can stay connected.
Analyzing The Cons of social networking: Social networking of course helps in a lot of ways but the users have to really careful to stay secure and safe. Security is one of the topmost concerns of social networking sites that you currently use. This is mainly because the social networking sites allow you to display your personal information such as name, location, and email address. There are some people who always in search of a fake identity.
If they get all the information about you on internet, they may use your identity for different type of illegal activities, which may cause you problems in future.It is always advisable to don't provide your entire identity information online. You may get many requests for adding as friends or joining different communities. Always try to know as much as possible before adding anyone as friend or joining any community. Because they may use fake identity or may involve in some illegal activities, which may spoil your image. http://www.
authorpalace. com/internet-marketing/site-promotion/advantages-and-disadvantages-of-social-networking-sites. tml by Julian Watknins Social Media is the current big buzzword in the world of Internet Marketing, and with good reason. It is already such a big part of the Internet culture. It is here to stay and should be ignored by marketers, or indeed anybody, at their peril. “Social Media” is an umbrella term used for many different aspects of the social Internet from Facebook to blogging to forums and there are so many variants of the same phrase used to refer to so many different elements of the social web, that it be confusing defining exactly what social media is.
Just to make sure there is no confusion, for this article I am settling on “Social Networking” as a phrase to mean the sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Myspace etc, where people connect with others directly. It is important to understand WHY people use these websites, as there is a broad demographic on these sites. Some people use them for business purposes, to network and find new deals. Then there are others who use social networking sites for purely personal reasons and are totally oblivious to the fact that there is a business presence in the social networking environment at all.
It is fascinating to see that there are so many different things going on in one place, and even more incredible that they seem to all work in harmony. 1. Purely Personal Reasons Easily the most common use of Social Networking sites, and the main reason for them existing in the first place, is for personal reasons. The majority of people using Facebook or Myspace keep to the “social” label. It is used for its original purpose – to keep in touch with friends. Some people will go on simply to update their status or view their friends’ statuses, or to look at photos from the weekend’s night out.
Some use it to connect to people they’ve met, a potential girlfriend/boyfriend perhaps, or someone who shares the same interests. One great way of taking advantage of the personal side of Facebook is keeping in touch with people hundreds of miles away, maybe somebody who has gone travelling or moved to the other side of the world. In the past it would have been nigh on impossible to keep in touch, much less keep up to date with what they are doing. A wall post on Facebook can work when a phone call would be too much, such as simply commenting to somebody that they should listen to a new song or making an amusing remark.It lets you have small conversations with people that you would not normally bother having if it meant a long phone call.
The people who use the tools for these purposes sometimes have no idea that marketing is going on, or that it is possible to use these networks for business purposes, and some even simply ignore advertising all together. 2. Business – Connecting with customers With the rise of Internet Marketing, social media is being embraced by businesses more and more. Innovative ways of utilising these tools by connecting directly with customers are being found.
Companies are seeing that the best way to conduct themselves online is to speak to their customers directly using these social networking sites, Twitter being especially useful for this. It increases the reputation of the company, gets them positive reviews and shows that they really care about the customer. It also gives a human face to the large corporation, meaning that customers or potential customers will feel much more comfortable coming back. There are some great examples of this strategy online, with a company called Virgin Trainsbeing one of the most successful.They have a small team of dedicated and named staff who run the Twitter feed as part of their overall PR role. Whenever a customer has a question or a complaint about the trains, for example – the train is late or something has gone wrong with their ticket, they post it on the Twitter feed and usually get a pretty quick response.
The response is sometimes a simple apology about a train being late, but it gives a human element to the company and this simple gesture could stop them losing a customer for the future.They can also act as a sort of customer service line, say somebody loses the code to pick up their ticket from the fast ticket machine they will post on Twitter, and get a response with the information they need. 3. Business – Networking There is also the opportunity for business types to network and expand their business on the social networking platform. This can take many forms, and take bits of each of points 1 and 2.
To get a deal is all about knowing the right people, and if somebody that you went to school with owns a multi million dollar business and your company do what he is looking for, using Facebook could have you on to a winner.A random friend request from somebody you haven’t spoken to since you were 11 years old could be the key to your company’s success. Alright, so that might have been a slight exaggeration. You could expand your business through old contacts as well as new, but it doesn’t mean they will be the factor that leads to your success.
Social networking sites like LinkedIn exist for this purpose; for people to network within a business environment. It does for businesses what Facebook does for students and teenagers, it lets people connect.It could find you a new business deal or could even find you a new job! 4. Marketing Another Twitter success story is Dell and their recent Internet Marketing strategy. Their outlet site sells refurbished PCs, and they post details about the newest ones on their Twitter feed.
They also post special offers just for Twitter users, and they send information about sales, along with discount vouchers to their Twitter followers. The company has generated $6. 5million in revenue from this venture. This shows the power of marketing on Twitter.This sort of strategy works well for e-commerce sites especially as they can market to an already targeted audience.
People would not follow the company if they weren’t interested in what they have to say. Saying that the strategy works as an additional extra to the normal everyday operations, and not as a new or the only way of marketing for the company, it should not be seen as a guaranteed winning formula and is probably more suited to an established brand as they are more likely to get enough followers to make it effective in the first place.It would probably not for example work for a company specialising in a niche product, or for a small non-established company. Social Media Marketing is a trial and error business, so it would be advisable to put into place experiments and do a lot of research before putting all of your eggs into the Twitter basket! 5. Entertainment Going hand in hand with the ‘social’ element of Social Networking, people sometimes go on purely for entertainment purposes.Myspace is a prime example of this, as many famous artists have been discovered through these sites (sort of sounds like marketing, huh? ).
Music is a big part but also videos, such as Youtube viral offerings, are easily spread on social networking sites. The newest craze is on Facebook, with all the game applications that have appeared over the last couple of years. The most popular of these is a game called Farmville which has managed to acquire 72. 9 MILLION users per month.That is a crazy amount of people to be playing a game about running a virtual farm! Now, a site like Facebook has not really been discovered for many of the other purposes of social networking. How many bloggers do you see marketing, connecting with customers or even conducting any sorts of business through the site? Not many I’ll bet.
It is very important to know the different usage of Social Networking sites BEFORE implementing a Social Media strategy. If you get it wrong and target the
