The latest data shows that almost 4.33 billion people in this world are social media users, which is almost 55% of the total global population. Well, the new era of communicating with each other on the internet is here, and it is connecting the whole world together. Everyone in this world is connected through social media. People having long distances with their friends and family will no longer wait for the mail like they used to do back in the days. The future is here and it is taking over the whole world. Millions of people are present on social media. Now we will jump on the topic and talk about the advantages and disadvantages of social media.
What Are The Advantages Of Social Media?
“With great power comes great responsibility” – we’ve heard this saying many times in our lives and we should learn something from it. Social media has great power in the world now and it is equally responsible for all successful campaigns and for the growth of many businesses. There are some great utilities of social media marketing.
1. Getting New Leads:
A hefty amount of users are on every social media platform. It is a great possibility for your business to gain a huge amount of people that are intrigued by your products or services. According to Pew Research Center, these are the percentages of the social media platforms:
YouTube – 81%
Facebook – 69%
Instagram – 40%
Twitter – 23%
Most adults around the world use these social media platforms. This can create great opportunities for your business to get leads. You can easily engage with your customers on different platforms. The potential to reach your audience is one of the great benefits of social media.
A local burger joint in the city can, for example, could use social media to reach out to the locals and tourists. For that, they have to target the audience within a certain radius of the location that would tap the people in that area. Boosting the organic post will lead to bringing traffic to the business.
2. Direct Connections With The Audience:
Social media is a platform where you’re directly connected to your audience and you know that they have an interest in your business because they are following your account. There are many benefits of social media that help you out in many ways:
- You get to know very well: If you know your target market, you can deliver more worthy content to them. You tailor the content more specifically to their interests, which gets us more leads because of their engagement on our page and with our business.
- You give them better customer service: A direct relation with your audience lets you solve problems easier. You can talk to them privately, deal with them person-to-person.
- You obtain worthy insights about your customer: The connection with your audience helps you to know your audience in a better way. You see who’s in touch with your posts and how they’re interacting with them. It helps you with your strategy to make it better for your audience.
- You see how your customers recognize your business: It feels good when you get to know how people perceive your company. Through social media marketing, you know what your customers think about your business. It’s a good advantage of social media marketing because you can make capital out of the points people like about your company and fix the part they don’t like.
A direct relation with your customers is a good way to improve your overall promoting campaigns. You’ll get a perception of your followers and will be able to alter and modify your social media strategy to meet their needs.
3. Creating Organic Content:
The capability of posting organic content for free is one of the remarkable benefits of social media marketing. It gives many chances for your business to connect with valuable reach for no cost. It’s one of the main reasons why brands love to work on these platforms. You can post content with no limits to engage with your target market.
4. Having An Access To Paid Advertising Services
If you want to go an extra mile for your organic posting, there’s an option to run the paid advertisements. Every other social media platform has its own form and algorithm for paid advertising. Your abilities in social media advertising may vary depending on your platform.
Paid advertisements make your business seek the opportunity to interact with people who haven’t found out that you are on social media. These platforms allow you to alter your ads to pop up on the feeds of the people who are looking out for your products and services. This makes a great chance for your company to expand your audience and obtain new reach. Your paid ads help more interested leads finding your business, which will result in new followers, also new conversions for your business.
5. Building Your Brand:
The advantage of social media marketing is the capability of building your brand. Whenever you connect with the interested leads, your brand is exposed to them. The potential of posting organic content for free allows us to build our brand recognition frequently with our audience. This forms brand loyalty. The more your brand gets exposure from the people, the more people will become familiar with it. Brand recognition leads the way to more conversions because the buying power increases if the people know the brand very well.
These platforms help you build your brand because it has a sharing option. You can always share and retweet content on social media. The users can share your content with their friends and family, which will help expose your business to many people. It’s a good way to obtain new reach. It helps in growing your followers and getting new leads.
6. Driving Traffic To The Website:
All of these platforms are a great approach for driving traffic straight to your business’s website.
Many social media platforms let you post content with a source to your website. Whenever you create content, you can tempt your audience to click on the link that will direct them right to your site, where they can get more info about your business. It’s a great chance for your company to help your audience to get even more familiar with your business. They can have a look on the website and learn about your services and products.
It depends on your business if you can let people use the option to book appointments or pay bills. Many companies have put up fill-up forms on their website.
7. Evaluating Your Performance:
In social media marketing, you have the ability to check out your performance. If you run a marketing campaign, you want to know how it’s completing your goal. All the platforms make it easier for you to track down your whole campaign to see if you’re getting the reach and proper results. You can calculate how many people are seeing your activities on the platform.
Whenever you are running an advertising campaign, you can always track the metrics for that. All the metrics will be shown like impressions and clicks. If you can evaluate your strategy’s performance, you can improve it to have even better results.
8. Joining Social Media Networks For Free:
One of the biggest benefits of social media marketing is that it’s free of cost to start. All of the biggest platforms have no signup fees, but you’ll find paid ad options on social media platforms. They are a helpful tool to grow your business and have many leads for your company. You just have to invest your time and efforts to maintain your presence on the platform.
9. Creating Viral Content:
Creating viral content is a great advantage for businesses on social media. People like to share stuff with their friends and family, from pictures and how-tos to interesting blogs and new deals. Far from other ways of digital marketing, just like your website and paid ads, your content on social media is repeatedly shared. Your followers share the content with their followers, who then share it further with their own followers, it gives you a wider reach at a very lower cost.
10. Uncovering Valuable Insights:
You can use social media to achieve some valuable information about your target audience that will assist you in making smart business decisions. For instance, social listening lets you discover how people feel about your business. By social listening, you can reveal conversations about your business and answer questions. What do your customers like about your business? How to improve services and products to meet the wants of your target market?
What are the disadvantages of Social Media?
With every marketing strategy, there are disadvantages. They won’t be meaning that your approach is wrong, but they’ll be an obstacle that you have on your way through during your campaign.
1. Receiving Negative Feedbacks:
People on social media post the content they like, but on the other hand, they also use the platform to share their experiences they didn’t like. If someone had a bad experience with your company, it will be a chance for them to share their bad experience with their followers.
All the negative feedback comes in different ways. Someone can leave a negative review about your business on your Facebook page and when someone checks out your page next time, they’ll see the reviews and look at the negative feedback. On websites like Twitter, users can mention a company in their tweets and share their negative reviews. Others can retweet the bad experience and escalate it over the network.
All the platforms are accessible for complaints and negative feedback. People use their Facebook profiles or Twitter handles to assist others to understand the bad experience. Many people give negative feedback to save other people from having the same experience as them.
The masses trust others to give them the perception of your business, mostly when they hear about your company for the very first time. With social media platforms, it’s likely that the negative reviews would delay your business from obtaining reach.
Adapting To This Social Media Disadvantage:
On any occasion, if you receive negative feedback on social media, reply to it. Don’t leave your customer’s complaint and concern unanswered. Not all people are going to have a good experience with your company, but resolving the issues can speak volumes about your business and its standards.
2. Opening Up The Potential For Embarrassment:
It’s easier for the posts to go viral on social media in seconds. Users are on the lookout for the good and the bad on social media. If you aren’t attentive about the content you publish, you’ll be ending up embarrassing your business and getting caught up in humiliation.
Adapting To This Social Media Disadvantage:
Before publishing content on social media, always do proper research about the topic before it.
Make sure the content you post isn’t triggering any caste, age, and gender. Your posts should be racism-free and discrimination-free because you never know the personal information of your audience. Researching will assist you to adapt your content to intercept your business from embarrassment.
3. Spending A Lot Of Time On Your Campaigns:
These platforms aren’t a one-and-done type of marketing technique. You have to continuously create new content, publish it, and engage with your audience on social media. A big flaw of social media is that it is time-consuming for companies. If you have a small company and a small marketing department, it will be hard for you to manage a social media marketing campaign.
You have to take out time to balance the posting procedure of content, keep a check on your content, respond to people, and calculate the content’s impact. It will be an uncontrollable task if you don’t have the resources.
If you aren’t sufficient with your social networks because you can’t put time, crew, or programs to assist you to run your marketing strategies, your campaigns will probably suffer. You won’t be as successful as someone who has ticked all the boxes to run a profit-making social media campaign.
Adapting To This Social Media Disadvantage:
For instance, if you don’t have enough resources, you can always outsource your social media marketing campaign to a agency. You can appoint a social media marketing company to handle your campaigns, while you run your company. Not to forget, you’ll be partnering up with people who have many years of experience running campaigns and have a knack for how to drive success.
4. Waiting To See The Results:
When businesses invest in marketing strategies, they want results straight away. You want to see that your strategies are running and the investment is beneficial for your time. Through social media marketing, you don’t get to see instant results.
The success is established on the campaign’s overall success. Publishing one piece of content won’t decide the success of your campaign. You have to keep posting content for a time period to find out the accurate success of your campaign.
It is a drawback of social media as long as you have to hold back to see the results. You must be cool, know that things take time, and wait for a couple of weeks to see the results before you rework your campaign.
Adapting To This Social Media Disadvantage:
To deal with this downfall, you have to be patient. You need to know that you can’t see all the true on-the-spot results until your campaign is running for a time period. Everything takes time and patience. What you can do is keep an eye on the performance of your social media posts as you publish them.
Conclusion:
All of these platforms have been helping out many people with connecting with each other and also assisting businesses to reach their target audience. You have to get new leads on your page, post organic content related to your business, and be connected with your audience. Don’t forget to put paid ads for your page and your company. Building brand recognition will take time and you have to be patient with it. Try to bring traffic to your page and website. Once you’ve published a post, you can evaluate your performance and take a look at the insights. If you’re doing social media marketing, then you should know that not everyone will be going to have a good experience with you and you will receive negative feedback. All of these are merits and demerits of social media, you can have positive feedback from your audience but also you should be prepared to receive negative reviews as well. To get new leads on your page and traffic to your website, feel free to get in touch with SEOHub, which is providing social media marketing services in Pakistan.