The Negative Impact Of Social Media On The Business Environment

Although there are benefits of social media on the business environment, there are also its bad sides. One of the bad impacts of social media would be a strategic shift on the marketing style. The marketing strategy of business nowadays is by engaging the customers up close and talk about the products they are selling. But, however, with the entrance of the social media-based marketing style, it is a must to learn how to form a bond with their customers who bought their product for those businesses that do a one-sided sell (Lovering, 2010). Now, instead of specifying the products benefits, companies have to develop stories of the background of the product.

Another bad impact following the usage of social media on business would be the increase

With the help of social media, it is now becoming difficult to control the employees’ activities on what they post online and to avoid them from posting about company matters without any consent (Lovering, 2010). The things they post may also hurt the company’s image and cause misunderstanding with the company’s investors.

Not only does the social networking affect the business negatively, it can also affect the workplace negatively. Social networking can affect the efficiency of the employees. For example, employees will lose 1.5 percent of their efficiency when they work in a company that allows them to use social networking such as Facebook (Zeiger, 2010). Due to the social networking abundance of applications and uses, this may cause employees to keep checking their phones for any updates or changes. And because of this employees will be distracted from performing their task, thus reducing their productivity in their

For example, the lack of teamwork in some groups may be due to employees abusing one another with negative and foul messages through social media. An employee may also be disliked by their colleagues because of his/her post about their bad day and this post is leaked to the superior (Zeiger, 2010). Due to this the relationship among the employees may be strained and uncomfortable. Social networking may also cause an increase in gossip within the employees as they are able to communicate with one another without anyone to eavesdrop.

Other than that, one of the disadvantages of using social media is that it may lead the company’s network to malware. The company’s computers and networking may be harmed due to this malware. Not only that, this malware will provide an opportunity to hackers to hack into the company’s system network. And this may lead to the hacker exposing or using the company’s network or may even corrupt the system by putting in viruses (Swain, n.d.). This issue will also affect the image of the company negatively because of their weak firewall to secure their company’s system