Social media has grown enormously in the past few years. Specifically Facebook and Twitter have grown much faster and gained millions of users in just a few years. The way technology is developing, it is clear that more and more people are going to grapple with its advantages. It has conducted a lot of benefits for the community. From advanced nations to under-developed countries, every nation is using the power of social media to improve life and utilize it for the bitterness of the people.
On the other side it has also influenced society in a negative way. Like anything which can be utilized for both good and bad, social media have also supplied the negative and positive ways for the people. It is all about the consumption and getting things done positively by utilizing the power of social media. It is in the hands of the user to utilize to its benefit. But voluntarily or not it can still have negative effects on the users. We'll discuss in this blog the advantages and disadvantages of social media.
10 Advantages of social media
1- Establish Brand Awareness
Social media is one of the most cost-effective digital marketing tools utilized to corporate content and elevate your business' visibility. Executing a social media strategy will deeply upgrade your brand identification since you will be interacting with a wide range of consumers. To begin, establish social media profiles for your business and start engaging with others. Gain employees, business partners, and sponsors to "like" and "share" your page. Getting people engaged with your content will establish brand awareness and start building your reputation as a business. Every post that is posted will be presented to a novel network of people, which can guide them to be potential customers, and the more people who recognize your business, the better. By infusing a few hours per week. There is no hesitation that by simply owning a social media page your brand will gain, and with orderly use it can establish a wide target audience for your business.
2-More Inbound Traffic
Without marketing your business on social media, your inbound traffic is limited to your regular customers. The people intimate with your brand are likely searching for the same keywords you already rank for. Without using social media as part of your marketing strategy, you'll have much more difficulty reaching anyone outside of your loyal customer circle. Each social media profile you put to your marketing blend is a guide to your website, and each piece of content you share is another chance to gain a new potential customer. Social media is a melting pot of different kinds of people with different backgrounds and behaviors. With variant people come variant needs and variant ways of thinking. Syndicating your content on as many platforms as possible allows these people to organically reach your business. For example, may someone in an older demographic of customers search for your website using a specific keyword on Facebook, but a chiliads could start their search by utilizing a different social media platform wholly, because they search for products totally differently. By marketing on social media you can efficiently open your business to a broader variety of flexible customers all over the world.
3- Enhanced Search Engine Rankings
Even though sharing on social media may get your business some website traffic, more attempts than that are acquired to see remarkable success. Search engine optimization (SEO) is very essential for attaining bigger page rankings and gaining traffic to your business website. Being able to rank in the top positions for your keywords will transform your traffic and carry on with producing positive outcomes for your business. Everyone utilizes Google to gain information, and they likely won't navigate past page 1 because their answer is on the first page of results. If your business website isn't ranked towards the top of search engine results, you should probably modify your search engine optimization strategy. To give yourself the best opportunity of ranking better via social media, generate high quality content that merges your targeted keywords. Content such as blogs, infographics, case studies, business information, and employee photos will make your business's social media profile interesting and trustworthy. Once you start posting quality content, you'll begin to establish a social media community where followers will "like" and "share" your content. Most significantly it provides you more chances to get in front of industry influencers who will mention your business and give links back - which will assist in increasing search engine rankings.
4-Bigger Conversion Rates
With bigger visibility, your business obtains more chances for conversion. Each blog post, image, video, or comment can guide viewers to your company's website and enlarge traffic. Social media marketing permits your business to provide a positive impression through a humanization factor. When brands are active and engaging by sharing content, commenting, and posting statuses on social media, it customizes a brand. People favor to do business with other people, rather than companies. The better impression you make on a visitor, the more likely they are to think of your business when the necessity for your product or services come to mind. When a brand is active online, customers who follow your brand's accounts often start to more totally trust the credibility of your business. People utilize social media platforms to stay attached to their friends, family, and communities. Since people are already communicating, why not throw your brand into the blend? More likely than not, they'll recommend your brand to a friend when your products or services are needed, overall giving your business social proof of its quality.
5-Greater Customer Satisfaction
Social media is a networking and communication platform. Generating a voice for your firm via these platforms is significant in humanizing your organization. Consumer’s value recognizing that when they comment on your pages, they will get a customized reply rather than an automated message. Being able to realize every comment indicates that you are attentive to your visitors' needs and focus on providing the best experience.
Each consumer interaction on your business's social media accounts is a chance to publicly illustrate your care for your clients. Whether an individual has a query or a complaint, social media permits you to understand the matter using interpersonal chat. A brand loyal to customer satisfaction that takes the time to create personal messages will naturally be viewed in a positive light, even if replying to a customer complaint.
6- Enhanced Brand Loyalty
One of the prime objectives of almost all businesses is establishing a loyal customer base. Realizing that client satisfaction and brand loyalty usually go hand in hand, it is essential to continuously interact with your audience and start building a bond with them. Social media is not just restricted to presenting your brand's products and promotional campaigns. Consumers view these platforms as a service channel where they can connect directly with the business. The millennial generation is known for being the most brand loyal consumers of all. Businesses have to execute social media marketing to gain the attention of their most influential customers.
7- Bigger Brand Authority
Consumer satisfaction and brand loyalty both perform a part in making your business more authoritative, but it all comes down to Connectivity. When customers view your business sharing on social media, particularly responding to clients and sharing original content, it makes you look more credible. Naturally engaging with consumers illustrates that your business cares about customer satisfaction, and exists to answer any queries that they may have. Satisfied consumers are keen to spread the word about a great product or service and they usually turn to social media to share their opinion. Getting clients mention your business on social media will promote your business, and show new visitors your value and brand authority. Once you gain a few satisfied consumers who are vocal about their positive buying experience, you can let the promotion be done for you by potential customers who liked your product or service.
8- Cost-Efficient
Social media marketing is most probably the most cost-efficient fragment of an advertising strategy. Signing up and establishing a profile is free for almost all social networking platforms, and any boostings you intend to invest in are a quietly low cost compared to other marketing tactics. Being cost-efficient is such a benefit because you can notice a bigger return on investment and keep a bigger budget for other marketing and business costs. If you intend to use paid advertising on social media, always begin small to realize what you should predict. As you become more comfortable, start increasing your budget.
9- Gather Marketplace Insights
One of the most effective benefits of social media is marketplace insight. What better way to recognize the thoughts and needs of your target audience than by directly speaking with them? By detecting the activity on your profiles,, you can see consumers' interests and thoughts that you might not be conscious of if your business didn't have a social media presence. Utilizing social media as a supportive research tool can assist in obtaining information that will support you in acknowledging your industry. Once you obtain a large following, you can use extra tools to analyze the demographics of your customers. Another sharp aspect of social media marketing is the ability to segment your content syndication lists based on topic, and define which genres of content create the most impressions. These tools provide you the ability to measure conversions dependent on posts on different social media platforms to sort out the perfect combination for generating revenue.
10-Thought Leadership
Sharing insightful and well-written content on your social media is a perfect way to be a professional and leader in your field. There is no single way to be a thought leader - it demands effort and work that can be supported by online networking tools. To build yourself a professional, make sure to use social media platforms and establish your presence. Communicate with your target audience, post content, and boost your authority. When your social media campaign is aligned with other marketing efforts, your skills will be highlighted and followers will look up to you.
Disadvantages of social media
Any marketing strategy will always include disadvantages. The disadvantages don’t mean that the approach isn’t efficient but rather, present potential obstacles you might have to go through during your campaign. You'll find below some of social media disadvantages and how to tackle each one of them.
1-Negative Feedbacks
Social media is used as a platform for sharing content and experience people have gone through, be it a positive experience or negative experience. If someone is not pleased with your business, then it provides them an opportunity to share the negative experience with others, which can certainly be an obstacle in the way of the success of your brand.
On the Facebook business page, people can grade you one star, write down negative feedback, and share their bad experiences in public with others. You can't edit or remove these negative feedbacks. The only thing you can do is offer a better service to them and ask to modify the rating and feedback.
If your brand page is on Twitter, users can tag a brand or firm and tweet their bad experiences. It can cut off various users and can negatively influence your brand identity that can affect the growth of your brand. What you can do is request to delete tweets and give them quality service in return.
How to tackle this social media disadvantage:
People take negative comments, and feedback very critically. Never underestimate negative feedback and define the causes for customer discontent, and correct the faults to rescue your brand reputation. Don’t give an opportunity to others to destroy your brand reputation.
Always positively reply to negative reviews, and comments, do not let it unsettled
Make it a routine to identify and sort out their problems if you want to reacquire their trust.
It would surely assist you in enhancing and working on the areas to switch a negative feedback into positive.
2- Embarrassment
In social media, it takes only a few seconds for your posts to go viral. You need to be attentive before sharing your content on social media. Review multiple times before sharing it so that you don’t need to face any sort of embarrassment.
How to tackle this social media disadvantage: Do your research before sharing content on social media. Regardless if it's a photo, a hashtag, or a video, do your research to recognize if there is any way it could be understood the wrong way. Research assists you in adapting your content to avoid your company from embarrassment.
3- Time devouring Campaigns
Social media is one of the most powerful and compelling platforms to establish and re-establish the content, to share photos, videos, and to interact with the audience. But, the prime disadvantage is that building and running social media campaigns is a time-devouring procedure.
The significant element you should oversee your business is the time element. Be it a marketing campaign or any other; everything needs time to be controlled. You should hit a balance between overseeing time for your accounts, for sharing content, for updating resources, for dealing with customers, for sorting out problems and managing damages, and much more.
If you don’t spend sufficient time on this because you lack resources, capital, and people, then surely, you will end up leading to a problem where your social media marketing campaign will suffer losses.
How to tackle this social media disadvantage:
You have to hire a social media marketing organization to build a digital marketing strategy, and you should have resources too.
Make a partnership with those who have advanced experience in controlling and running profitable social media marketing campaigns.
It would certainly extend the doors for the success of your business, guiding to its enlargement, growth, and building loyalty and goodwill.
4- You Need To Wait To See Results:
It is natural that when you do something new, you like to notice the wanted outcomes and you are worriedly waiting for it. You have to realize that your business and marketing strategies are running smoothly and operating efficiently or not. But in the case of social media, it is not so that you will get instant outcomes. As said, good things take time, so you have to be patient enough to get the outcomes.
You have to consistently share fresh content linked to your campaign to attain success. The outcome of social media marketing campaigns will consume time to define results. Never predict instant results, and you need to wait for it patiently for a few weeks or even months to achieve success.
How to tackle this social media disadvantage:
The only way to tackle this social media disadvantage is that Be Patient. Good Things Take Time.
You have to keep in mind to wait as your campaign has just begun, and you can also monitor the performance after running many campaigns for some time.
After that, just to view the areas which need enhancement for the expansion of a business.
5- Have to Remain Connected and Interactive
It is also one of the disadvantages of social media that you should remain connected and interactive every time you observe your marketing campaign. Social media is continuously changing, so you have to be up-to-date else you will fall behind.
To thrive in any social media marketing, you have to consume enough time to achieve the best out of it as people on social media are always searching for something fresh, new, and updated instead of old and outdated
How to tackle this social media disadvantage:
You have to be an interactive user, consuming most of your time on social media for your marketing campaigns to direct to successful outcomes.
Never give up, and keep trying new and creative campaigns.
Learn from your competitors.