Social media has been all the rage these years, and with more than one million people joining this platform every day, it’s going to be even more powerful. A handful of social media apps and sites are now the real places where people interact, post what they’re up to, speak their heart out, share their experiences, and pretty much everything.
In the world of business, experts believe that where there are people, there is always scope for marketing! That makes social media the perfect platform for brands to find and interact with their targeted audiences. As a businessman, you typically hear about how social media marketing can grow your business. Does that mean social media has no downsides? When you are in the digital space of social media where things go viral, you must watch your steps carefully.
So, today, we are going to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of social media marketing. This guide will help you navigate the ever-expanding social media world and make the best out of its endless possibilities while staying away from possible pitfalls.
You can also think of this section as – why social media is important for business marketing or what makes social media the best platform for branding awareness.
Social media marketing comes with a host of perks and the most important ones are as follows:
Find your target audience from all different locations in one place
Through social media, you can reach your specific audiences from around the world in a single place. That’s something more effective than television ads and newspaper classifieds which simply broadcast your message to all people (using these platforms) regardless of whether they could be your potential customers or not.
Even if you are someone who believes in reaching out to your audience through email marketing, believe us, you will get better returns on investment when you combine it with a social media marketing plan. Why? Email marketing might be good at converting subscribers into customers, but social media is the boss at increasing brand recognition and awareness. Besides, if you implement effective SMO strategies, you will get customers through social media as well.
If that’s not enough, take a look at these figures:
Over 44% of internet users worldwide used social media for brand research the last year
200 million Instagram users visit a business profile daily
18.3% of Facebook users buy a product through the platform in 2020
81% of people research products and services on Instagram
(The above statistics are referenced from Hootsuite.)
Get to Know Your Audience More and Impress Your Audience Better
You have to know your audience better to present the right and relevant messages in front of them. Without knowing them, you are least likely to impress them. Social media is the platform where you can study your audience, directly connect with people, and gain valuable insights. It’s a great way to learn what people think about your brand.
Once you know your customers better, you will be able to deliver more relevant and personalized content to them, resolve their issues easily, build a positive brand image, and refine your future strategies to further enhance the brand experience for your customers.
Build your brand image the way you want
When people see a brand’s advertisement, all they learn about it is its products/services and the level of creativity. On social media, you don’t have to pick up a professional camera every time you want to say something. You can spread the word even by using trending memes, gifs, hashtags, quizzes, and so on.
By regularly uploading engaging stories and posts on social media, you get a unique opportunity to humanize your brand, create an emotional connection with your audience, and show how you think and work. When people get to know you behind the scenes, they feel like they know you, they have a bond with you and ultimately, they start trusting you.
Can be used for paid as well as organic content
Paid advertisements can be essential, sometimes, to give a push to your reach and connect with valuable leads that your business couldn’t find on its own. What’s more, platforms like Facebook support a variety of advertisements and offer additional features and guides for those who want to run more interactive ad campaigns. However, paid content is expensive and thus, good only for short-term strategies.
When it comes to being present amidst your audience, the cheapest and most trusted way is organic content. You can create and post it for free. That’s why businesses, especially small ones, love sharing organic content. You can create and post as much organic content as you want without having to worry about the budget while getting profitable leads.
Your content can go viral – the goal of most social media marketers on this planet!
Every business sets out to become famous worldwide. Social media has the power to grant this wish, given that your content is freakishly awesome, entertaining, engaging or anything that instantly grabs people’s attention. Hundreds of millions of people use social media every single day. Thus, if you have content that urges people to engage in any way, you can become famous almost instantly. If you can do that once in a while, people may even start looking for your brand specifically.
Can drive traffic to your website and thus, enhance your credibility in the eyes of search engines
Creating content that people like to dig in is something that doesn’t come easy but not out of your control. For that, you will need to research your industry, stay updated and relevant, and learn more about your audience. Besides, social media marketing is not a one-time thing. To drive traffic to your website, you have to continuously create stellar content, including images, videos, ads, or text messages.
If you can pique the interest of your audience through your content or ad, people are more likely to click the button ‘Visit our website’ or ‘Shop on website’. When your website starts getting regular traffic, Google and other search engines deem your website more reliable and prefer to rank it higher than the ones that don’t seem trustworthy or get much traffic.
Can measure whether you are succeeding in your campaigns
In the beginning, it wasn’t easy to evaluate the performance of your marketing efforts on social media. However, now, social media apps and sites allow you to create a business page or profile or set up a professional account. Professional and business accounts make it easy for you to see if you are doing things better, whether you are reaching your target audience, how many people are engaging with your content, and more. You can get all the metrics you want to know and then use them to further change, improve, or optimize your content and social media marketing strategies.
No need to pay a dime for setting up your business/professional account
None of big social media companies require you to subscribe and pay for creating accounts. You can create more than one account (for different branches, countries, etc.) at no cost. The only investment you need is your time and creativity. If you have a team to handle your social media marketing, then include that cost and that’s all. If you feel free to splurge, you can spend on paid advertisements.
Disadvantages of Social Media Marketing
Even with social media marketing, you can face issues if things are not done the right way. Let’s check out where you need to be more careful.
Your content can go viral! (Don’t be surprised.)
Yes, I have mentioned above this point as an advantage. The very same benefit is a major drawback as well. It all depends on what you are sharing. If your content shows ambiguity and people can conjure it up the wrong way, it can do a lot of damage to your brand. Even if your post with sensitive content is there on social media even for a minute or few seconds, it can still go viral and ruin your reputation and the goodwill you have created till now.
Take Dove for example. It’s a big brand with a large customer base. For a long time, it has been sharing content (including ads) that focuses on empowering women and setting raw, natural, and realistic standards of beauty. Its campaigns have been utterly successful throughout these years. But it took only one ad for Dove to receive a huge backlash from women around the world.
Image Source: The Guardian
The ad showed a black woman who transformed into a white woman with an entirely different appearance and race after using a Dove lotion. The ad wasn’t received well by women, especially because Dove advertises itself as a promoter of the fact ‘every woman is beautiful in her own way’ and then somehow posted a racially sensitive ad. That ad made Dove look like it follows double standards.
Later, Dove deleted the ad from Facebook and then released a statement with an emphasis on the importance of review.
In short, any type of mistake – typo errors, wrong information, incomplete information, emotionally-sensitive content, and inhumane content – can mean taking many steps backward in terms of brand image and reputation.
What to Do: The only way to avoid embarrassment from such situations is to do intensive research and a rigorous review. By rigorous review, we also mean to review the content with different points of view. If freshly created content has something that might hurt people or show your incompetency in any way, please ask your creative team to make changes or create entirely new content if needed before posting it on social media.
You can get negative feedback on social media.
In business, you cannot please everyone, and you cannot control your customers from providing negative feedback. Lots of negative feedback not only hurt your ranking but also reduce your trustworthiness among other customers, especially people who are planning to consider your products/services for the first time. People may ignore a couple of negative feedback; however, if there are many, they will abandon your website.
What to Do: You can tackle negative feedback by responding to them. Don’t leave people frustrated when they are unhappy with your customer service, delivery, packaging, refund issues, or face other problems while using your website or app. Post your response accordingly in the most sincere and calm way. If their issues can be resolved, update them beforehand and then do the same.
Social Media Marketing Requires Enormous Amount of Time and Creativity
Unfortunately, social media marketing can be time-consuming, tiring, and overwhelming. You will have to come up with compelling and engaging content almost every day to post on social media to stay in touch with customers. Plus, you will need to monitor your content, assessing the response of people, and evaluate its performance. Getting yourself busy on social media will leave little time for you to focus on your actual business.
What to Do: You have to either gather your resources in-house (which can be quite expensive) or hire a reputable agency for social media marketing. When you choose to work with a digital marketing agency, they will handle your social media campaigns more efficiently. Plus, you will benefit from their years of expertise and knowledge in this particular field.
You have to be patient to see results.
Understandably, when you invest your money in a team to create effective strategies and run campaigns, you want to see instant results. However, just like search engine optimization, social media marketing is also an ongoing process that takes time to produce significant results.
What to Do: The only thing you can do in this case is to focus on creating engaging and relevant content and be patient. If your team is doing good work, you will see results over time.
Final Thoughts
Social media can be pretty amazing and overwhelming at the same time. The right marketing techniques can grow your business and take its popularity to the next level on social media platforms. Besides, it also has the potential to bring your stature down if you don’t do it the right way. If you need any help with social media marketing, get in touch with us. We will be happy to take your worries away by increasing your reach and connecting your brand with potential customers on social media.
Vijaya Raj Laxmi Tyagi has been an avid content writer for over five years with a keen interest in writing SEO articles and blogs. She also finds great enthusiasm in writing about a vast variety of topics, including gardening, interior designing, health & wellness, and tourism. Her educational background in Computer Science and Engineering has given her an edge to write about technologies that tend to mark a great impression on daily lifestyle and behaviour, while her intrigue towards Mother Nature drives her to discuss green topics.
