INTRODUCTION:

Social networking is basically defined as use of social media platforms to make connections with friends, family and other relatives by sitting anywhere in the world. In today’s modern business world, we all have access to mobile phones, tabs, laptops and especially internet almost every time and everywhere.  Thus it comes quite impossible for us to spend our day without interacting with some form of social media. The growth of social media has tremendously changed the way people communicate with each other. It mainly includes sites such as Facebook, whatsapp, instagram, LinkedIn and many more.

 Along with the advancing the way people communicate with each it also brings great opportunities for business as well. The use of social media has increased for the purpose of recruitment and selection, organizational collaborations, employee engagement, public relations or internal as well as external communications. Although social media has come out as a boon for the business enterprises through the ways like free marketing, brand awareness, direct feedback of customers But the problems becomes severe when employees start using social networking sites for an unacceptable time period within the workplace.

SOCIAL MEDIA AT WORKPLACE:

Any workplace comprises of both the employees as well as employers. Increasing trends of social media at workplace means that both the employees as well as employers are engaged in it. Employers are using social media for the purpose of change management, recruitment, and managing multigenerational employees and to promote their business while on the other side employees are using it for recreational purpose like chatting, posting etc. Thus the problem is not with using of social media if used properly and can become effective business tool but in certain conditions, it might leads to serious issues to businesses. Some of the possible advantages as well as disadvantages of social media to workplace includes:

Merits of social media:

• It has been found in certain studies that employees active on social media have the ability to things differently thus they are capable of taking innovative decisions and actions.
• It is also important to notice that employees engaged in social media are keen to improve their productivity and accept new challenges with a motive to post their achievements on social media and get compliments in return.
• The employers can make profiles of their company on social media and can post new changes and innovations that take place within it. This helps in creating awareness about the company’s brand and thus acts as an important marketing tool with minimum cost.
• It provides the business an opportunity to improve public relations and further widens their outside contacts.
• It also helps the employees to openly communicate new ideas, ask questions, share links etc.

De-merits of social media:

• It might leads to some serious privacy issues to the employees , if the employers start looking into the personal profiles of their employees to check their personal information and use them while recruiting them
• The use of social media through company’s network may have the risk of stealing sensitive information by the hackers or the possibility of malware attacks to company network.
• The employees may ruin the organizational image or goodwill by bad mouthing about the organization on social sites.
• Moreover the use these sites by employees to disclose any such information which is illegal or explicit may results into facing some serious legal consequences either by the employer or the employee himself.

Thus it can be said that everything has its good and bad effects and this applies to social media use as well. There is a need on the part of progressive employer to create a balance between its merits and demerits and direct its usage for the welfare of the overall organization. The employers are required to develop and maintain policies regarding the use of social media at workplace. There is further need to conduct training programs to make the points of policies clear to those on whom it is going to applied. And if the need arises, the strict punishment rules must be made in case the employees violate any rule or policy.