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Guest Blogger: Derek Ochej

Despite the many similarities of different social media platforms, each one has its own positives and negatives. In no particular order below are what I personally find to be one positive and one negative aspect of each of the ‘big’ social media accounts. Agree? Disagree? Let your feelings be known in the comments.

Facebook

Positive: The one platform that everyone seems to be on. Things certainly have changed since being a student was a requirement for getting the Facebook. You don’t even need to be human: for example, in university I created a Facebook account for the store mannequin we had in our living room. Having such a large audience makes it easy to keep up with many different people and groups.

Negative: The awful algorithms that are the reason why 90 per cent of my Timeline is full of things that friends, or friends of friends, have liked. I don’t have a voyeuristic instinct to see baby pictures and humblebrags from people I don’t know.

Twitter

Positive: The best source for breaking, but not always accurate, news. Twitter is the first place I go once I hear rumours of something big in the world, whether it is a possible coup in Turkey, or the end of Brangenlina.

Negative: After having tackled this issue a few years ago, the spam accounts and bots are back with a vengeance. The amount of tweets that I have made or been tagged in that have been liked by pornographic accounts attempting to drive me to a website makes me reluctant to check Twitter at work.

Instagram

Positive: The best platform for photos and videos, and probably one of the simpler social media platforms, although I can see it starting to get more and more complicated.

Negative: Almost as bad a problem with spam as Twitter (hence why I have a locked account) and how difficult it is to search for relevant accounts. The search function is made worse by the preponderance of fake/’parody’ accounts.

LinkedIn

Positive: A solid source of professional information and relevant news, particularly once you have built up a network of contacts in your field or that post interesting content.

Negative: Suffers from trying to being way too many things and having too many features. Also seems to be losing the professional etiquette that separated it from the other social media accounts on this list.

Snapchat

Positive: The story function is really quite neat, and it seems to be gaining a lot of traction due to its popularity with younger generations. The fact that POTUS has an account and uses it to share behind-the-scenes content is pretty neat.

Negative: It makes me feel old since I don’t really have a big contact network on it, and the fact that I don’t really understand all of its functions.

What are your personal opinions on some of the popular social media platforms? Love ’em? Hate ’em?

Jennifer Baker Consulting