Building a Social Network: Pros and Cons in Business and Career Development

It is one thing to have a business idea. It is another thing to make use of the right tools and strategies to bring the business into reality and develop it afterwards. Here’s the point where building a social network comes in.

Social networking is essential for a business to keep being in the spotlight. With the increasing level of digitalization, many business owners are at a crossroads, seeking opportunities, building good relationships with their customers and striving to evolve with the trend in their chosen fields.

In this piece, I will be walking you through how to use social networks for business and career development, why it is important as well as the pros and cons of building it.

Table of Contents

How to Use Social Networks for Business and Career Development

Essentially, social networks are used for networking and connecting with other people. It is used for various personal or business reasons. Beyond how it has helped us to connect and relate with friends, family or loved ones, it is very useful for business and career development.

How then do we use it to promote business goals and develop our career? Here’s a rundown list of how you can use it:

Make use of the direct line and intimate communication tools on various social networking platforms to interact with your specific audience directly or indirectly, creating an awareness of your brand.
Your target audience and potential buyers are hanging on these platforms every day, so go get them. You wonder how you’d get them? Research your prospects. Ask yourself, who are my prospective buyers? Who needs to know about what I do?

It is not enough to create an avenue to build relationships for the sake of social networking. You need to engage your prospects authentically and respectfully and build their trust in you by giving room for feedback and questions from useful and valuable content shared.
Utilize the comment feature on the various platforms to get feedback and follow through with your audience. Their feedback will help you improve or adjust in specific pointed areas, which shows that you’re responsive, reliable and interested in building a long-term relationship which will resultantly aid business development.
Be a problem solver and a “value adder.” Use social networking platforms to add to your audience’s knowledge about what you do. Create awareness and content that solve their problems and help to achieve their goals. Get them to know positive things about you and your business.

Why Social Networks Important for Business and Career Development

As human beings, communication is part of our everyday life, which social networks have made easier, faster and more effective. It helps us to reach a diverse audience at a particular time. Apart from building a social network for personal reasons, it serves business purposes.

If you’re a business/career person with a great business idea or career strategy, you need social networking to achieve your objectives. Building a social network for your business is like building a pillar for your business to rely on. Here’s a stat showing the level of social network usage.

“90% of Instagram users follow a business. 62.3% of Instagram users say they use the platform to follow or research brands and products. 66% of Facebook users visit a local business page at least once a week…”

All human aids for the development of their business or career are on these social networking platforms. This is where your audiences are. You’ve only got to choose the best platform that will enhance your business.

From top CEOs of different companies to small-scale business owners, social networking is essential to specifically reach the target audience or public for your business, create brand awareness and provide solutions to problems.

As the world evolves to become more digitalized, social networking remains an effective strategy for the development and maintenance of personal and business relationships using social technology. This comes through social media formats that aid interactions and enhance relationships.

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Pros and Cons of Building a Social Network for Business and Career Development

Social networks are very useful tools in business development, and to a large extent have impacted the aspect of communication and relationships with people. However, it has some pros and cons.

Pros of Building a Social Network

Social networking has to a large extent aided business and career development, some of which I’ll be listing:

Connection

It encourages building business connections and enhances business relationships. Social networking platforms allow you to connect with a large number of people on a single platform. It allows you to connect with similar professionals in the industry regardless of cultural and geographical boundaries or location.

Communication

It is aimed at helping people communicate, and build and enhance relationships. Communicating via social networks aids faster and easier communication. It is the hallmark of most social networks, with information reaching people quickly in different geographical areas. For individuals or organisations, intending to reach diverse people, social networking is the best strategy to use.

Creates brand awareness and advertisements

Social networks help to increase brand awareness by creating advertisements for businesses. With the use of inexpensive social ads, you can reach your target audience and make them aware of the benefits you’re set to offer them.

For example, you can collect user data from other websites to determine what your audience wants and create daily ads tailored to satisfy their wants.

Considering these major pros, building a good social network is vital for business and career development.

Cons of Building a Social Network

While it is very essential to build a social network for business or career development with its many benefits, some cons should also be considered to be on the safer side of the ride. These cons include:

Cyberbullying or cyber insecurity

With the ability to share information quickly and open access to users, there could be instances of predatory behaviour like scams, hacking, etc, which could damage the image of an individual or organization.

Misinformation

This challenge has been assumed to be a propagation of misinformation. People tend not to believe most of the information they get on individual or organization pages because they feel it’s not true or it’s overhyped. People who have experienced, “what I ordered vs what I got” will most likely not take this information seriously.

Privacy

Also, building a social network requires getting the personal data of people. Any data posted online, no matter how personal it is, is open to a lot of people and can be compromised in cases of cyber attacks.

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Conclusion

Social networking cannot be overlooked in business and career development. However, as much as building a social network for career development can be so advantageous, it must not end there. You need to consistently follow up and be on the lookout every time to avoid the backlashes.

Trust me, building a good social network with the ideal people will go a long way to determining your business or career success.

Edited by Priscilla Ajayi.

About Author

Adeyemi Ezra: A content writer, copywriter and fictional author. I like to explore writing on lifestyle, entrepreneurship and many more with valuable and highly insightful contents that relates with prospects to educate and motivate.