Top 10 Advantages and Disadvantages of Social Media (Explained)

If you have been asked by your teachers to explain the advantages and disadvantages of social media, or you just want to know how social media networking is impacting our world, we are here to explain everything to you and let you understand what are the main and top advantages and disadvantages of using social media for society, students, professional life and other fields of work. This will be a pure guide for those who are looking for a realistic point of view and wanna understand it by the words of an actual social media user.

Yes, I will be writing it with the core of my heart and my own experiences as a student, regular employee, and a business personality to working from home. I will explain everything in two sections, first for the advantages of social media and then for the disadvantages of social media apps and websites.

As everybody who is using the internet is using as little as two social media apps, whether someone has an account or not, they are using some apps like Facebook, TikTok, and Twitter. The most advanced social media users use Twitch, Instagram, and Tumblr too. Did I missed WhatsApp? and Messenger or IMO? well, you are using Google, and it's becoming a social media giant too (we will learn about it in a new blog post).

Top 5 Advantages of Social Media:

With multiple advantages of social media apps and community websites, we can pick the top 10 easily and we did it by researching online and using all the major social media platforms personally.

So, these benefits are real and can be seen at your side too:

1. Free Registration

The most beautiful and the greatest advantage of social media is you can create an account for free, whether it's Facebook, Twitter, or TikTok, all of the social media apps, community forums, and websites are allowing free registration that comes with all the latest features of all the major social media networks.

You can take an example of how it can help you build your business or reach the unlimited fun just by creating a free Facebook account and joining some relative groups, there you could connect with thousands and even millions of relative people, you can post and comment, all is free.

2. Global Connectivity

Social media apps like Facebook and Twitter are making the whole world connect through the internet. Any person who has a working internet connection and a social media account (social media account registration is a free process) can easily connect with the rest of the world.

Twitter is one of the best social media networking sites to find real people and talk with them or share your views to a global community. You can learn more about the evolution of social media and its place in modern society and understand how global digital connectivity networks are changing our world

3. Advertising and Promotions

Small businesses and even the giants in every industry always look for promotional methods that are cheap and provides the highest ROI (return on investment). With social media advertising solutions, social media is there too with the advantage of advertising any business online and it could be started even with $1 dollar and there are various events when many social media websites announce coupons and offer to test their advertising systems that give you a chance of promoting your product or service for free.

This is the best way of advertising online the top advantage of social media is you can target your selected audience to easily sell your items.

4. Useful for Noble Causes

If you are running an NGO or looking to help a local community of helpers and organizations, you can do that for free on a high level of promotional activities that really gives you donations and help to raise more funds and help a person, a community, or a charity organization.

One of the best social media networks Facebook is allowing you to promote your noble cause for free by asking for donations and this feature of Facebook is available to all the NGO and other organizations that are working for humans, animals, or any other noble cause. All of them and even you with a general Facebook profile could take advantage of these features and help others for free. You can read why 94% of NGOs agree that social media is an effective way of brand awareness and communications.

5. Free Help for Students

Students pay thousands in school, college, university, academy and books, stationery, and even for their daily classes. This is becoming a speed-breaker in the careers of many students and thus many of them stop their studies in mid.

Social media is helping and could help a lot for your education, it could provide you free updates, ebooks, free lectures, and also friendship with fellow students from around the globe could help you gain more scores in your exams. This is a real help.

6. Helps Fight Crime

Some people think that social media is bad and it can be the reason of crimes, but, there's a different approach by many agencies and governments that uses social media and track users (according to the terms of services of social media apps and regulations of a country) that helps government and law enforcement agencies to fight crimes and catch the culprits. This is a breakthrough approach for catching criminals as quickly as never possible before.

7. Easy Access To News

With real-time updates from your friends and the entire world on Facebook and Twitter respectively, you can easily get the latest updates about the latest happenings around the globe. This makes it clear that we have fast and easy access to news content on social media networks.

For example, Twitter is a trusted social media network where most of the political leaders and public figures tweet about their thoughts on different topics and all of them tweet publicly, so everybody could reply to them and give a direct comment.

This is something that is much appreciated by Twitterati (twitter users) and then we have Facebook, we can like pages, follow people and pages, join groups and add friends or simply make our own profile, group, or a page that can be used as getting latest updates on a timely manner.

We can use hashtag search and Twitter's discover page where we can easily find what's trending near us or around the world. This is something that Radio and Television can't do, but the internet is capable of more than this.

Top 5 Disadvantages of Social Media:

When started searching for disadvantages of social media, we learned that there are more than a few drawbacks of using social media and the worst thing is, we all could hit the damages from these disadvantages.

So read them and learn how to avoid such disadvantages of social media for students, professionals, and the general public:

1. Ponzi Schemes and Scams

Frauds are everywhere, but when it comes to social media, the number one source of doing scams or promotion Ponzi schemes online is social media platforms. Most of the scammers use Facebook and Twitter to hunt innocent people and teenagers who don't know what a Ponzi scheme is and how to be safe from online scams.

They promote such scams in a way that the general public thinks the scheme is legit and they start investing that eventually led them to lose all of their money. Some even give profits to a few members of their scam and leverage the trust points for scamming more than a thousand other people. This has been happening a lot with MLM (multi-level-marketing) programs. Every now and then we can see such social media updates from new profiles and some of the oldest accounts.

So we should be safe from such scams and frauds. You can learn more about all types of social media scams and also check some of the most common social media scams that you can/should avoid.

2. Cyberbullying Is Common

Though many features have been introduced by Facebook for its apps Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp, cyberbullying is still there. On Twitter and other sites like Reddit and Tumblr, this is something users could become cyberbullying victims very easily.

This begins when you gain some following or when someone who knows you is against you and want to harass you online or within your online community. Using social media with a free account is normal, everybody could register a new account with a fake email or a fake phone number, this enables such users to do such acts of cyberbullying.

If you are seeing that you are becoming a victim of such practices, you should report such accounts and posts, you should inform your local law enforcement authorities.

3. Blindly Following Trends Causes Death

When we say, social media causes death, it's for real. The common thing on social media is a feature called hashtags and this feature comes in mind when there's a new trending story and when there's something that is trending over top social media sites (Facebook and Twitter).

Most of the youngsters follow every new trend and they do it to gain more and more followers so fame. Some of the trends could cause death and there are a number of cases reported worldwide that led various users of social media networks to lose their lives just by following a social media trend.

One should always double-check a trend and before performing any action based on the trending topics, make sure it's not harmful in any way.

4. Social Media Addiction

This is the real and most harmful disadvantage for students and jobholders. This could lead to low marks and low productivity. Social media addiction is not like drugs-addiction, but its outputs could be the same.

Many teenagers are addicted to social media apps like TikTok and Instagram, they are using such apps for hours on a daily basis and they do unsafe things just to gain some more followers and likes. This could be a danger for their lives and should be stopped when noticed by any elder or an authoritative person.

On the other hand, if you don't use social media apps, you could be more productive.

5. Social Media Health Issues

When you are addicted to a social media network and you use it for hours, you could damage your health and it causes various health issues. It could be related to your eyes, back pain, blood pressure, and even it can make you lazy and unproductive. So, make sure you are not getting addicted to any social media app, it could seriously impact your health and make you ill.

There are a number of deadly disadvantages of social media that we think couldn't because of using social media networks, but there are a lot of reports about it and some of them are:

• Social media causes depression
• Social media causes anxiety
• Social media causes mental illness
• Social media causes stress
• Social media causes low self-esteem
• Social media causes stress

And a lot more, but we rarely give attention to these factors.

We will be updating this article time by time and will add more information about social media pros and cons for you.

If you are a student, an employee, a parent, or a business person, you should read and share this article with your friends and family members to make them aware of the top 10 social media advantages and disadvantages of social media.