There are a large number of people that have a Facebook page as it is a great way to get in touch with your old friends and to share information about your life with your friends all over the world. While facebook reigns as the most popular social media site out there, it does caution it’s users to limit the information they post online as it is accessible by anyone and this can lead to identity theft and many other concerns. If you are investigating facebook and trying to figure out if you should start up your own profile, here are some pros and cons to facebook that will aid in making your decision a little easier.
Pros of facebook
Let’s start with all of the things that make facebook a great thing to have. First of all it has the highest user percentage of all social media sites, which means there is a good chance that most of your friends, co-workers, and relatives will have a facebook page that you can interact with.
Facebook is a great way to connect with your old high school and college classmates. This is the biggest selling point to facebook because it really does allow you to reconnect with a lot of old friends and to make new friends. There are a lot of people that use facebook to find dates by checking out the friends of their friends.
Do you have loved ones that live far away? Facebook helps you to stay connected but it also allows you to share your pictures with them of recent family vacations and other things. For grandparents and aunts and uncles, facebook provides a great outlet where they can see their grandkids and nieces and nephews grow up.
Companies and individuals use facebook to promote their companies and services. If you have a charity event, facebook is the way to get people to connect with you and hopefully support it. Facebook has a lot of opportunities for self-promotion, making it a great outlet for anyone that really needs to find clients and to get supporters.
Do you have celebrities and tv shows that you follow? Facebook allows you to “like” on their page and you will be able to get status updates about what episodes are airing along with other great information like access to concert tickets before the rest of the public. Having the “insider” scoop to your favorite sports teams will also allow you to hear about who is starting at quarterback this week and other great information about your favorite teams.
Cons of facebook
Now that you see some of the big reasons why you need to try out facebook, we will look into some of the things that make facebook annoying and also scary to your privacy.
The “friend” game. Remember the old high school bully who has now changed his or her ways? Well what do you do if they want to be your Facebook friend? It seems like everyone takes the term “Friend” differently. There are some people that want to be your friend and you might have said “hello” to them once 20 years ago. The good thing is you really don’t have to add everyone.
The facebook newsfeed. This is where all the new information is posted or the profiles that have status updates with a lot of comments. The newsfeed can be nice but it can also become really annoying. This is where you will end up blocking a lot of status updates and other things because they do become simply too annoying. The newsfeed is where a lot of information is shared and you may be thinking to yourself “who cares that your neighbor’s dog barks?” There are a lot of people that just want to talk and they use Facebook as that outlet.
Spam is another problem with facebook because it seems like everyone will send you invitations to games and things that they like. Farmville invitations will get old along with other invitations like “which celebrity are you like” and so on.