Social Media,
Advantages & Disadvantages of Social Media
December 4, 2020
Rudra Kumar
The advent of social media has stopped the world in its tracks. It allowed people to interface with friends and relatives in real-time. It gave people the chance to express themselves in different ways through pictures and instant images. And it has now given brands, and business houses the opportunity to reach out to people in a way that was never possible before.
In this blog, we will uncover the advantages and disadvantages of social media marketing.
We will first discuss the positives of social media marketing, and then move on to discuss the disadvantages that come with advertising on social media platforms. Let’s begin.
Advantages of Social Media
One of the biggest advantages of using social media for marketing is its capacity to help you reach and target millions of people from all over the world. Whether it is a specific region, country, city, or locality – social media has the potential to help you target and market to the smallest of audience.
We will now do a countdown of all the benefits of using social media marketing.
1: You can target a large audience base
As of 2020, these social media platforms enjoy the following number of users:
- Facebook: 1.82 billion users
- YouTube: 2 billion users
- Twitter: 330 million users
- Instagram: 112.5 million users
- LinkedIn: 303 million users
The number of social media users is expected to grow steadily in the coming years with each platform experiencing a steady increase. This is a big advantage for business organizations that rely on social media marketing as they can reach out to more people.
This means that there is a massive opportunity for you to target different users from different age categories in all social media platforms through social media marketing.
2: Ad customization options
What makes social media marketing an attractive marketing option is the customization options that come with it. For example, most social media platforms allow you to select your daily ad budget and choose your target audience.
Some of them have evolved their ad customization options, making it a gold mine for marketers trying to sell a product or a service.
Here are some examples of Ad customization options offered by two social media giants:
Facebook:
- You can advertise to your target demographic on Facebook based on where they live, their gender, age category, job title, political inclinations, and specific life events such as their birthday, graduation, engagement date, or their wedding anniversary.
- You can also target people on Facebook based on their shopping behavior, interests, activities, and the pages they have liked.
- Additionally, Facebook also allows you to target people based on their income level. So if you are selling an expensive product, you can select your preferred audience and their income levels to strategically target those who can afford your products or services.
Instagram:
- Instagram is another famous platform for social media marketing. It allows you to target people based on their age category and city, state, and country of residence. You can set your daily ad budget and select the number of people you want to target.
- Moreover, based on your advertising needs, you can also choose different CTA options such as ‘Learn More’, ‘Visit Website’, ‘View Instagram Profile’, and Shop Now’. You can also choose your destination URL to direct people to the website or webpage of your choice.
3: You can track and optimize the performance of your advertisements
So you have started an advertising campaign, set your ad budget, and run your campaign. Now what? What is the next logical step?
Tracking.
If you can’t track the performance of your social media advertisements, you can’t scale it’s reach or meet your conversion goals. The beauty of social media marketing lies in its capacity to allow you to track how your ads are performing on the platform you advertised in.
Based on the analytics reports, you can modify your advertisements, evaluate where you’re getting maximum traction, and create a concrete plan of action to scale the performance of your advertisements. Without Ad tracking, this won’t be possible. So it is high time to thank social media marketing for making this possible for all marketers out there!
Additional Read: How Social Media can be used as a Lead Generation Channel?
4: Social Media Marketing is cost-effective
Other advantages of using social media for marketing is its cost-effectiveness.
As compared to conventional advertising options such as print media or TV advertisements, it is incredibly budget-friendly. But that said, it is only cost-effective for those marketers who know how to use their ad spend effectively.
Social media marketing is advertising best mastered by professionals who know when to pull back when needed, as you can quickly burn through your marketing budget if left unmonitored.
However, given that social media marketing is comparatively cheaper than other forms of marketing, it gives you the room to experiment and identify a marketing tactic that works at a budgeted price. And truth be told, that makes all the difference!
5: Social Media Marketing helps you drive traffic to your website
Social media marketing helps you attract website traffic through creative options.
For example, social media marketing offers a CTA option. Be it your landing page, product page, eCommerce store, or your company page on social media – you can use this CTA option to direct people to your chosen destination.
In other words, you can use social media to scale your website traffic exponentially. All you have to do is ensure that your landing page is perfect to the T so that your website visitors are motivated to explore it further. To make this happen, write compelling website content, avoid filler words, and remove unnecessary pop-up banners on your website. This will enhance user experience which will go on to further encourage website browsing from your visitors.
Moreover, you can go one step ahead and optimize all your website pages, especially a product or service page. This will encourage your website visitor to make a purchase if they like what they see on your website.
6: Social Media Marketing increases your brand awareness
There is no hard and fast rule that your social media marketing initiative will help you get audience engagement, brand followers, or make sales.
But the companies that do invest in social media marketing can build brand awareness in ways that a company that does not engage in social media marketing fails to do.
Humans are wired to recognize and trust the things that they are familiar with. In a lot of ways, that’s what social media marketing does for you. By repeatedly showing your advertisements to your audience, SMM trains your user’s mind to acknowledge and remember your brand.
So while your audience may not end up purchasing anything from your brand straightaway, they will remember your brand. As such, they are more likely to trust your brand over newer brands they have never seen or heard about. So even if you don’t convert your target audience into customers right away, social media marketing leaves an imprint on them and trains them to become potential customers of your brand in the future.
So when you come to think of it, social media marketing has its perks. If nothing else, it helps you build brand awareness and enables you to become an established brand – even if your conversion goals like building brand loyalty and making sales are not immediately met.
7: You can uncover valuable customer insights
Winning in business is all about understanding customer psyche and behavior, and social media gives you a winning advantage over your competitors. Through its various advertising tools, you will have access to valuable information about your customers that you can use to advance your business.
In a world where data is power, the ready availability of user data can help you make smart business decisions. You will be able to track the performance of your social media campaigns, understand how users are interacting with your ads, and get an understanding of what works and doesn’t work. Using this information, you can make much-needed changes to your marketing strategy.
Additional Read: Social Media Marketing: A Step by Step Guide
Disadvantages of Social Media
Social Media Marketing, despite its many pros, has its own sets of cons. Like two sides of a coin, social media marketing has both its good and bad sides.
We will now explore the drawbacks of social media marketing. Let’s begin.
1: Social Media Marketing requires a lot of time & planning
Despite its many advantages, social media has its many drawbacks.
The most significant disadvantage of social media marketing is that it takes time. It takes effort. And it requires an ocean of patience to perfect it.
To get followers, attract likes and engagement on your posts, and make an army of brand loyalists, you need to invest a lot of time in your social media marketing strategy. You need to innovate, create content, post it, and engage with your audience regularly.
This requires dedicated effort, planning, and a long-term strategy. You need to plan your social media calendar months in advance and make time for social media.
If you don’t have the time or the resources to do this in-house, you might want to look at social media marketing agencies who can do the work for you.
2: Slow return on investments
As we have established above, social media takes a long time to show results. Another social media marketing disadvantage is that you won’t see immediate results as it takes a long time to perfect it.
The success of your SMM efforts depends on the overall performance of your social media campaigns. You will need to post multiple content pieces over a considerable time, track their performance overtime, and evaluate its effectiveness to know if your Social Media Marketing investments are fetching results.
This is a significant disadvantage for those businesses who are keen to see instant results. The only way out is to practice patience. After all, the results of an effective SMM campaign can be massive, and you don’t want your impatience to impede your business growth on social media!
3: Exposure to Competitors
That social media is open to everyone is a pro and con. All accounts, especially business accounts on social media, are open to all social media users.
The problem here is that everyone can copy each other’s social media strategy. On the one hand, you can study your competition and adapt their strategy, and on the other, so can they. This means that your business stands the risk of being ripped off because your ideas are always up for the taking.
The only way out is to be as innovative as you can possibly be with social media, and this isn’t always easy. As such, the open nature of social media and the exposure to competitors it leaves you with, is one big notable disadvantage of social marketing.
4: Exposure to negative feedback
Social media is an open platform for social sharing. Be it Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter – people tend to share their thoughts and experiences on these platforms. This is one big social media disadvantage for business owners and brands because it means that you stand the risk of receiving negative feedback from your customers.
On the one hand, excessively negative comments can ruin your brand’s reputation if similar problems are amplified on social media by today’s influencers as they carry a lot of social media clout.
Let’s say that an influencer says something negative about your brand; impressionable followers can form a negative perception of your business. It can impact sales if these followers are already your customers or discourage them from buying your products or services.
On the other hand, you can take negative comments received from your users in a positive stride. Being on social media helps you track audience sentiment about your brand and tells you where your product or service is falling behind. You can evaluate this information, identify the negatives, and use it to improve your products and services.
So in a way, we can say that the open-endedness of social media makes it both an advantage and disadvantage of social media marketing.
5: Potential PR nightmare
What goes on social media stays on social media. . . . . not really, but people remember!
This is why you should be cautious about the content you post on social media platforms. With social activism and political correctness becoming the norm of the day, it has become extremely crucial for brands and businesses to stay ‘woke’, insightful, and respectful of public sentiment.
If you post anything contentious, the issue can spread like wildfire on social media, and you can receive a lot of public lash back and criticism.
Even if you try to delete a contentious post on social media, it won’t completely go away because the chances are that hundreds of screenshots would have circulated already. As such, the whole issue can spiral out of control and transform into a PR nightmare with the blink of an eye. This can lead to bad press and a lot of company spending on damage control.
6: Monetary Investment on Skilled Professionals
Most social media marketing strategies are earmarked for success if you use the helping hands of expert guidance. But this comes with a hefty price tag.
If you are serious about investing in social media marketing, you will need to hire a social media strategist. Additionally, you will need to hire expert graphic designers and copywriters to create visually appealing social media creatives and write powerful captions.
These monetary investments would cost more than just paying their salaries. You will have to shell out money on ad spend and creative-making tools too.
7: Security and Privacy Policy Issues
The seventh major disadvantage of using social media marketing is the security and privacy policy issues that come with it. When you sign up as an advertiser on various social media platforms, you are required to surrender both private and public information. This makes you vulnerable to data leaks from the hundreds of millions of hackers who might be working for a competitor.
Conclusion
We have discussed all possible social marketing advantages and disadvantages in this blog. We believe that despite its potential drawbacks and the risks it can pose, social media is an excellent tool in the hands of business owners. If you’re one, you should make full use of it.
You can’t be a business in the 21st century if you’re not investing in social media marketing because the truth is that your competitors will be actively investing in SMM strategies. Your failure to keep up can mean that your competitors will always stay ahead.
You can’t afford that. No business can. As such, we recommend that you draft the roadmap for a social media marketing strategy. This will help you reach your target audience, introduce your brand to your ideal demographic, and target them effectively.
If you don’t have the capacity to do this in-house, feel free to avail our Social Media Marketing Service. We have found success in SMM and can replicate this success for you.
We hope that this blog was helpful. Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!
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