Social Media in the Workplace Persuasive Essay

1. There are both advantages and disadvantages to social networking sites in the workplace. The main advantages include facilitating communication between employees which helps to enhance information transfer. Another key advantage to allowing social networking in the workplace is it increases business contacts by allowing an easy platform to communicate with potential customers and partners. The Society for Human Resource Management website, demonstrates my final point on why social media is beneficial in the workplace, they state “It improves business reputation and client base with minimal use of advertising. As social media sites continue to garner a huge amount of users, it has become more effective for companies to set up pages on these sites then to use traditional forms of advertising. Setting up a company page on Facebook and Twitter allows companies to advertise for free while attracting more potential customers then they ever could. There are also a few disadvantages associated with allowing social media sites in the workplace.

First, social media exposes users to spam and virus attacks from hackers which could harm a company’s technology and infrastructure. Second, allowing employees to use social media sites opens up the possibility of negative attention since employees are a direct extension of the company. Inappropriate language or content on an employee’s page can be detrimental to that person’s employer. The final disadvantage to allowing social media in the workplace is it could potentially result in loss of productivity if employee’s abuse there privileges. ttp://www. shrm. org/TemplatesTools/hrqa/Pages/socialnetworkingsitespolicy. aspx 2. Considering both the advantages and disadvantages, I do believe employees should be permitted to access social media in the workplace. Social media websites like Facebook and Twitter can be extremely beneficial to companies that are trying to connect to more customers and opportunities. Also, many of the disadvantages of social media in the workplace can be remedied by placing rules on how employees can act on these sites.

For instance, employers could restrict employees from checking Facebook more than once an hour, also employers could restrict employees from putting certain content on there social media sites especially things that could be damaging to the company. 3. To ensure that employees are not posting anything that could be destructive to the company, employers should monitor activities on social media sites. However if an employee uses Facebook or Twitter for personal reasons rather than business reasons, they should not be subject to monitoring.

For those employees that do use social media for work, monitoring is necessary because content spreads rapidly on social media, so negative content needs to be deleted before the possibility of widespread outrage. 4. When I am on the clock, I do not use social media sites like Facebook and Twitter because I do not even use these sites when I am off the clock. I do not currently operate a Facebook or Twitter page for myself so I do not have the temptation of wanting to check it during work.