Social media has been rapidly gaining ground as a digital channel for brand management, rather than just being a tool for socializing. It is, in fact, one of the most powerful marketing tool for both upcoming and established businesses. The reasons are many. Not only is it less expensive, the advertisements can also be personalized according to the interests of the end customers. It is no surprise that businesses are multiplying their spends on the proper utilization of social media tools.

However, like all channels, social media marketing has its own merits and demerits. While it promises huge profits if implemented properly and effectively, it can sometimes prove detrimental to your brand, giving opposite results as compared to your expectations. In this post, we shall outline the major social media pros and cons so that you can make informed decisions when building your digital marketing strategy.

Social Media Pros and Cons

The Advantages of Social Media Marketing

1. Advertising is now affordable

Almost all social media platforms offer channels for free advertising and promotion. You can obviously use this medium to create a business profile and circulate effective content on a regular basis. For more customized reached and increased traffic, you should consider spending a bit on paid social media marketing. Another option is to hire an expert digital marketing agency.

The brand custodians and digital marketers can plan your entire strategy and highlight your brand to the target audience. Since they are updated with updated digital analytics and algorithms, they keep the digital brand orientation in place.

2. Exposing your brand to a larger customer base

Nowadays, brands that are not on YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn or Facebook are often understood as slow or brands of the past?

Presence on these social sites help a brand to reach their audience with better content, establish credentials and maximize engagement. With over 3 billion global users who actively browse social media sites, you have a huge customer base to explore. Managed rightly, social media marketing techniques, can help you showcase your brand’s services and products to the exact niche or target customer base.

3. Helping in building trust

When you have an online presence, customers can reach you directly and connect with you on a personal level. Usually, whenever we hear about any venture, we usually check it out on LinkedIn or Facebook. When your organization is present on such platforms, complete with reviews and feedbacks, it enhances your authenticity manifold.

During your campaign, you can communicate with clients via live video streaming or chats. You can also go a step ahead and start addressing their questions and explain how your brand will help in resolving their concerns. This helps in building excellent customer service, increasing reliability, and forging long-lasting relationships.

4. Inducing brand loyalty

Another benefit is that it aids you in creating a permanent and loyal fan base. Most of the marketing tactics that promote brand loyalty are entwined with your social media strategy. When you deliver consistent product and service quality, it increases customer engagement. This, in turn, leads to you being recommended by them, which helps in converting regular customers to loyal clients.

5. Increasing conversion rates

Almost 90% of retail brands use social media to communicate with their customers. Obviously, with such a huge target audience, much of this traffic gets converted into real sales. When you personally interact with your clients, you can push them further up the sales funnel — by directly answering their questions. In fact, social media marketing has double the success in the lead to close rates, as compared to outbound marketing techniques.

6. Giving insights into the marketplace

After you introduce your brand on social media, you can closely monitor the reactions and feedback of your buyers. You gather insights on what people are saying about your products or services and accumulate know-how about your competitors.

You also come to understand which content helped in amplifying your reach more. After analyzing the results, you can use the insights to improve your content strategies for business development, brand management, customer service, and content marketing.

The Disadvantages of Social Media Marketing

1. Time-consuming

Now that we are exploring the social media pros and cons, one of the biggest negatives is that this process takes up a lot of good time. Building up a brand presence and maintaining it in the long term take up a lot of brainstorming and consume multiple hours. Most marketers use 11-12 hours weekly in order to promote products on social media and engage with customers. This extra time could be used for other important business activities but to get the best results this kind of time investment is required.

2. Security Breaches

Once you enter the realm of social media marketing, you should be aware that there are many players who work non-stop to gain access into channels that have monetary gains involved.

Hackers can break into your security system and use it to trace customer records, buying history, and enter your enterprise’s network. High security costs and finding the best security providers is a difficult task.

3. Permanent brand-image damage

Social media is highly volatile. Whenever you post something publicly, sometimes it can become detrimental for your brand image. For example, insensitive content or comments that hurt public sentiments can cause irreplaceable damage to your brand reputation.

4. Difficulty in measuring ROI

The return on investment from social media marketing efforts is quite difficult to measure. Yes marketers can measure their effectiveness in tangible terms but it needs substantial work on strategy, audience profiling and lead optimization. Hence, this proves to be another negative among the list of social media pros and cons.

However, the ROI depends on your end goal. For some, it may be to improve their customer base, while for others it may be a boost in traffic or increase in sales. Depending on your end goals, social media marketing can take many months before showing a return on investment.

Yes, like all other tools, social media marketing has its own merits and demerits. But, with proper planning, execution, and continuous learning, you can minimize most of the drawbacks included in the above list of social media pros and cons. Before going ahead with your investment, try to analyze the effect of the tool on your business’s brand. It’s a good idea to have a social account that helps in advertising your brand and boosts your products and services by making them available in large geographic demography. However, you need to consider its negatives as well before making the final plunge — so that the cons don’t outweigh the pros.

Are you struggling with social media ROI or consumer engagement tactics? Feel free to connect with us for a detailed social media marketing audit and social media strategy.