I have written about social media in the last few days, discussing the rise of viral videos, both corporate-sponsored and user-created, as well as the variance in social media use across cultures.
It is clear that social media is important and plays a significant role in the internet marketing and SEO campaigns of companies of all sizes and in all industries.
They get true value from these campaigns and without them, their online properties would suffer.
Two issues that I haven't discussed however are the rise in social spam and the social overloading that is occurring with executive-level companies.
I would like to address these inter-related issues here as I think they are signs of growing pains for social media and nothing more.
Social Spam Twitter and Facebook, among others are ramping up the number of employees to deal with the issue of spamming.
These sites are built around the user experience, and if the spamming is taking away from this experience, these platforms want to rectify this situation quickly.
The size of the issue is quite alarming and it is growing.
Facebook stops 200 million spam actions every day, and still 4 million Facebook users are impacted daily.
The sharing and liking features are the primary means for people to be connected to malware which is how the spam encounter occurs on these platforms.
Like other evolving internet applications, they are taken advantage of for malicious use, retooled, made stronger, and they will live on being used for their intended purpose, but not before some revisions are made.
Social Overload Similarly, with the popularity of social media, companies are trying to maximize their usage of it to connect and interact with their target audiences.
In doing so, many companies are stretching themselves thin by having and continually updating a great number of social media accounts across platforms for different departments of the company, specific campaigns, and initiatives.
Research from Altimeter Group shows that executive-level companies (1,000 or more employees) manage an average of 178 separate company-owned social media accounts.
This can be problematic for companies and put extra strain on its employees.
In Sum Social Media brings in too much return for companies to do away with it or even significantly scale back on it.
With that said, changes will come in how it is utilized.
Social media will be more strategically managed (and possibly scaled back slightly) as just less than half of executive-level companies have a coordinated approach to handling their accounts.
It will also be incorporated into SEO and other internet marketing campaigns that much more.