Understanding the Cons of Social Media

For all its upsides, social media has its downsides. As social media has
gained in popularity, it has also become increasingly difficult to gain visibility
among its hundreds of millions of users.
In fact, sometimes you have to craft a campaign just to build an audience
on a particular social media site. It’s quite similar to conducting optimization
and inbound link campaigns so that your site is found in natural search
results.

Don’t participate in social media for its own sake, or just because “everyone
else is.”
By far, the biggest downside in social media is the amount of time you need
to invest to see results. You need to make an ongoing commitment to review
and respond to comments and to provide an ongoing stream of new material.
An initial commitment to set up a profile is just the tip of the iceberg.

If you became addicted to news alerts during the 2008 presidential campaign
or couldn’t take your eyes off live coverage of the Mars landing, or if you
play Farmville or other video games with a passion, continuously run instant
messaging, or check e-mail every ten seconds, watch out for social media.

Individually and collectively, social media is the biggest-ever time sink.
Without self-discipline and a strong time schedule, you can easily become so
socially overbooked that other tasks go undone.

As you consider each of the social media options in this book, consider the
level of human resources that are needed. Do you have the time and talents
yourself? If not, do other people within your organization have the time and
talent? Which other efforts will you need to give up to make room for social
media? Will you have to hire new employees or contract out services, leading
to hard costs for this supposedly “free” media?