Social Networking: Advantages and Disadvantages

These days' social networking sites have become extremely popular among the youth as well as the professional world. Even the elderly are becoming part of the world wide phenomenon that is social networking. We all like to think of all of its great advantages when it comes to our personal lives and our businesses, but we tend to overlook all of its disadvantages.

When you first become a member to one of these social networking sites, the first thing they ask you to do is give them all of your personal information and to post a profile picture. At this point it all seems so harmless, because you fail to see the bad for all of the good. Most people post their personal information with a bigger picture in mind. Some of us use it for personal reasons, others do it for their businesses, and some do it simply just to have fun and look for old friends. Everyone all has different reasons why they tend to use these sites without thinking twice about putting that information out there into the world. We seem to never think that anyone would ever use our information for online scams and identity fraud. There are a lot of advantages to using these social networking sites, but there are also a lot of terrible disadvantages too.

Social networking sites can be some of the best places to be a part of if you own a business. The main reason for this is the endless amount of potential new clients that are out there on these sites. Social networking sites are a great way to promote yourself, your business, and all of the services you provide. This is an excellent way to advertise and to get your company's name out there and noticed. One of the biggest perks to business owner's especially small businesses is that all of the advertising is free. What could be better than that? It is great opportunities like this that help us to forget about the downfalls of putting all that personal information on here to begin with. Normally we are so excited about all of the positives that these sites offer us, that we usually ignore the negatives that come along with them as well. By putting all of our information out there to promote ourselves and our businesses, we are making it very easy for dishonest people to use our information against us.

Think about when you meet someone in person for the first time; you can usually get a good idea of who they are and what type of person they are also. But when we are on these sites meeting new friends and potential clients we cannot be sure of whom we are really meeting. When we are meeting these people we could be meeting the people they want us to meet and not themselves. This does not mean that every person you meet is doing this, but this is something that we all have to watch out for on these sites. By using social networking sites to meet new friends or clients we are cutting out the face to face meeting and communication, and this is what allows us to get to know the person in front of us.