Social Media V/S Traditional Media: Pros and Cons

What is Social Media?

Media is an instrument on correspondence, similar to a daily paper or a radio, so social networking would be a social instrument of communication. Social media or networking is turning into an indispensable part of life online as social sites and applications are receiving more and more attention by the people every day. Most conventional online media incorporate social parts, for example, remark fields for clients. In business, social networking is utilized to market items, advance brands, interface with current clients and cultivate new business.

Social Media alludes to the method for communications among individuals in which they make, share, and/or trade data and thoughts in virtual groups and systems. All the famous social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, and so forth, are mainly governed by the Office of Digital Communications that manages their main accounts. Hence, it is basically the group of online communication channels dedicated to community-based input, interaction, content-sharing and collaboration.

What is Traditional Media?

Traditional media, also called “old media”, on the other hand, is the kind of media that was hugely used for mass communication, advertising and marketing from a long period of time before the advent of Internet and social media. These include a number of tools of communication such as magazines, books, newspapers, radio and television broadcasts. Traditional media has been utilized as a part of the promoting/publicizing world for quite a long time. These types of correspondence are the immovable ways that organizations have come to both consumers and other companies for decades. They are the bases of promoting and the most widely recognized structure used by organizations on a daily basis. However, despite the fact that traditional media is powerful, through the span of the most recent couple of years we have seen more organizations using new media to achieve its intended interest groups.

Difference between social media and traditional media:

Social media is truly an ideal model change or change in world view as opposed to just another arrangement of strategies. Traditional media depended vigorously on one-to-numerous ideal model — the brands make a message and transmit that message to the masses through broadcast, print, radio, or signage. However, is restricted to a one-way communication method that doesn’t make engagement or progress in the direction of promotion of the idea. Now, this is something that the social media is all about. It engages people with one idea and helps the take the word of mouth to the next level of promotional success. This is the hallmark of social networking. Yes! It literally is networking of more than one or several people together. Most importantly, the reason behind the success of social media over the traditional media in recent times is that all the organizations worldwide believe in instant promotions through networking of people on a specific subject. Hence, the idea is dissimulated to a large number of people and at the same time we get to know there opinion on that particular idea or product.

However, both of these milestone tools of the media industry have their respective pros and cons. Let’s have a look at that:

Pros of Social Media:

Because of the energizing environment of social media, there has been a considerable increase in criminal prosecution in the recent times across the world.

Due to social networking, one gets to create social connections which are really very beneficial to live in today’s era.

Students have become smarter due to social media as they are being exposed to a whole new world of technology through the tools of social media.

Social media has changes the lives of many people, as it provides a better social life where you are in contact with all your near and dear ones through a matter of a click.

Last, but not the least, social media acts as a powerful tool of employment for people as millions of people get jobs through social networking sites.

Cons of social media:

Most of the news that people read on a daily basis come from social media sites. This in turn, affects the readership or viewership of the print and television media.

Sometimes social media forwards a lot of misinformation that leads to serious problems in the society.

Nowadays, children spend a lot of time on social media sites, which in turn, affects their studies as well as they get exposed to the things which are not appropriate to their age.

With the advent of social media, people have almost stopped meeting each other as they can be connected through the social media sites the whole day. This has affected the face-to-face communication tradition among people.

Every person in this earth is so very much dedicated to the social media sites that they even use them the whole day at their work place. This in turn, results in less productivity.

Do not have reach to remote places.

Pros of traditional media:

Through traditional media people can experience real world communication. They can talk to one another in person and witness each and every gesture of one another. This helps in better understanding of the given proposal.

It provides flexibility in production. People can produce the communication idea as per their need.

It has a high rate of coverage as in countries like India, there are still loads of people who are not yet introduced to internet. Traditional media has the access to such areas as well.

Immediate delivery of message to a large number of people at a time.

A message generated through traditional media stays on to the people’s mind for a long time.

Cons of traditional media:

It’s a one-way communication process.

Sometimes traditional media can prove to be forced on you. Many times when you do not wish to see a promotion of any product, still you have that in front of your eyes and it makes you forcefully learn about it.

The word of mouth in traditional media does not scatter rapidly to a large number of people and they even do not get instant feed backs on them.

It also experiences lack of community as many times the audiences and viewers do not have something in common with a product or a brand.

Advertisers spend lot of money in a bid to reach out to the target audiences but many times the whole effort fails.

Related Courses :Social Media in the Workplace,  Social Media Marketing