By Philip Yiga | April 28, 2018

Social-media is one of the technologies that have greatly revolutionized the way business is operated today. In fact, social-media has provided multiple businesses with a platform for marketing activities of different products and services to various customers all-over the world. This has allowed businesses to grow and improve on their relationships with possible clients on various grounds. However, the use of social-media and other interactive-sites can have negative effects on businesses especially if it’s not regulated. in fact, research shows that only 1 in 7 companies has a formal process in place for use of social-media networks and the same survey also states that there is only 1 in 5 companies that has established a policy about the use of social-media. So, businesses without any policies controlling the use of social-media are facing several risks and negative effects as listed below:

 

Negative Effects of Social Media on Business:

1. Reduced Employee Productivity: Social-media actually allows people to interact with each other virtually. So, some employees tend to spend most of their time on social-media networks and this leads to reduced productivity at work since such employees tend to focus less on their daily job activities. This is very bad for companies because it will prevent them from attaining their targeted goals and objectives within a stipulated time-frame.

 

2. Increases Customer Power: before the rise of social-media networks, businesses used to find ways of engaging and addressing the public on issues regarding customer dissatisfaction and other bad-experiences. However, with the use of social-media today it’s relatively difficult for businesses to attain control over customer-issues because customers have more power to express negativity to the public and this leads to faster spreading of negative-publicity about a given company. In fact, with social-media customers can quickly post negative experiences and dissatisfaction towards a particular company without considering the possible impacts it could create to their business in public.

 

3. It reduces on personal-relations between employees: with the use of social-media in business, there has been a reduction in the way employees interact with each-other physically. in fact, employees prefer seeking advice from social-media networks rather than consulting and communicating with their fellow employees. This is actually very harmful to businesses that embrace or rely on teamwork to facilitate certain processes leading to a reduction in productivity levels.

 

4. Increased unauthorized personnel speaking on behalf of the company: Any well-established organization should have a structured communication that is authorized to talk and communicate issues about the company to customers and other associates. However, with social-media platforms it has become very challenging to control employees from speaking on behalf of the company to customers. In fact, some employees even create fake social-media accounts in order to disseminate information regarding the company and this can be risky especially if the provided information is not true or inaccurate.

 

5. It makes it hard to track negative comments: social-media platforms actually make it very difficult to companies to track negative or misleading comments since anyone can comment about anything regarding the company negatively and then spreads the information. In fact, even if a company may be in position to track some of these negative-comments and respond to them accordingly, it would be too late because the comments would have gone viral and responding to them won’t bring any meaningful significance to the company.

 

6. It reduces on Confidentiality within a company: Allowing employees to excessively use social-media networks increases the vulnerability of a company to possible breaches in matters about secret-information. In fact, some employees tend to post sensitive information on social-media platforms and this may damage the reputation of the organization or even make people start doubting its credibility and reliability. All in all, releasing sensitive and confidential information that the company was not prepared to release yet can greatly jeopardize the company’s plans.

 

7. Less control on information shared on social-media: Although social-media interactions such as re-tweets, likes, comments, shares help to shape your social media marketing activities, they can also turn against your business-campaigns if the interactions or comments shared are negative hence affecting your business towards a larger audience.

 

8. It’s Highly Time Consuming: Companies that have implemented social media activities for their marketing-strategies successfully understand how much time it takes to learn and implement all of them. On the other hand, employees tend to spend a lot of their productive-time on social-media platforms chatting with friends and this can greatly affect the performance of businesses in the long-run.

 

9. Burden of the Marketing Shift: While social media-based marketing can be used effectively to market products and services, businesses that are used to providing a one-sided sell must learn how to develop a relationship with people buying their product or services instead of releasing statements about product lines. In fact, companies now have to develop stories that promote the culture of their products instead of simply listing the benefits of a particular product or service.

 

10. Unpredictable Scheduling: Unlike traditional advertising where workflows were determined by predictable publishing and broadcast dates, social-media platforms force your marketing department to respond to unforeseen changes at any time of the day or night. This implies that social-media users determine the scheduling of marketing and amount of work to be done rather than using your own marketing goals.

 

11. Increased unhealthy competition: Today, there are many businesses marketing their products and services over social-media platforms and this has actually led to unhealthy competition whereby even some businesses tend to tarnish other brands in the name of gaining popularity on social-media platforms.