WE ABSORB AND CONSUME AND CONSUME SOME MORE,

LIKE KIDS GETTING HIGH IN A CANDY STORE

WE LOVE IT, WE HATE IT, WE THRIVE, WE SURVIVE, 

WE DELETE IT AND GO BACK BECAUSE THE WITHDRAWALS KICK IN AND WE GOT TO BE REVIVED.

She shares her thoughts on the pros and cons of the digital era business ecosystem we are living in. 

Here is her take of our screenager world. 

You are scrolling through your Instagram and a Whats app notification pops up. You switch. As you are replying to that, an email comes through. As you slide that up with the thought that you will get back to it in a minute, twitter shows you someone’s latest 140-character opinion. You are halfway through reading that and an Instagram DM along with an indefinite number of notifications to see how many likes you got on your last post. You switch again. Your mind flickers back to the email you need to respond to, but you are now swiping through the stories which are like the shortest most addictive real-life episodes.

Yes, we do live in a truly digital world, not far away from the massively trending show Black Mirror that we all ‘oooh’ & ‘aaahhh’ & ‘no way’ about, to each other. While a large portion of it is not too far from reality and the repercussions might not be the best for humanity as a whole, the digital era that we live in, like everything else in life has its fair share of pros and cons. 

To categorize how social media directly impacts your brand building or breakdown, here is a quick list of pros and cons that you might resonate with in that hemisphere of life. Some of it might seem obvious but through all the noise in the cyber world, these are the ones to keep in mind when you are in any sort of doubt whatsoever.

PROS 

1) YOU HAVE THE FREEDOM TO CONNECT WITH AN INCREDIBLY LARGE AUDIENCE

With all of the best social media platforms being free of cost to use, you 

are at liberty to directly connect with your audience which allows you to

tweak the quality of customer service much quicker based on the direct 

feedback that you continuously receive. 

2) YOU ARE IN CHARGE OF YOUR COMMUNICATION CONTENT

Based on the feedback that you get from your current and potential customers, you can engage and optimize your content to drive more sales of your product or service. You have the bandwidth to tailor your marketing strategies and give your business the opportunity to grow exactly how you see fit. 

3) THERE IS NOTHING STOPPING YOU FROM GROWING YOUR BUSINESS AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT 

There is power in word of mouth and the way people speak now is via social media. It is completely up to you how you want to divide and conquer with the multitude of tools available to bring your brand to the highest potential you see fit for it. 

CONS 

1) DECISION PARALYSIS 

If you are a business that is just starting up, it is most likely that you shall get overwhelmed navigating through the varied platforms. This continues to happen even if you are an established brand with new social media marketing tools coming up faster than we ever imagined. A simple solution to this is to pick 3 or 4 and stick with it. Persistence and faith are your two best friends in this online decision paralysis game. 

2) YOU CAN AND MOSTLY WILL FACE DIRECT NEGATIVE FEEDBACK

The flipside to having an audience that you can communicate with directly, is that you will hear all of the opinions – the good, bad and ugly and will have to manage the repercussions of the latter two, for yourself and for your team. To put a positive spin on how to manage this, know that just like you, everyone has their individual opinion and that there is an appreciative audience for everything. 

3) COMPETITORS HAVE ACCESS TO ALL THAT YOU DO

This is part and parcel of the social media world and the part it plays with building your brand. To be fair, we are all guilty of researching for inspiration, so the best thing to do here would be to keep it to inspiration and trust that others will do the same. Engaging your mind in who might have copied who is only wasting precious time where you could be using your creative energy in a fruitful way. 

With all of these pros and cons in the business world, social media plays a very big role in the rest of lives too, which could sometimes be a major distraction and could also sometimes bring forth multiple surprise attractions. I hope you consciously choose to balance the two, until your scale is tipped towards the attraction space where all of it becomes a natural flow.

ABOUT AAHANA:

Aahana is an author, a marketing consultant, a content writer, a happiness program creator, a spoken word artist and an all-round human enthusiast. After having been one of the co-founders of tech start-up for 4 years, she came to understand how the variations of social media play a pivotal role while building a brand among other things. She also believes that this is an instrument that is used to influence pretty much aspect of the mind in the urban world and we must take the time out to constantly stay aware of this and harness more positive than negative from this.