Often we hear plenty of praises of social media from the marketing bods. After all, when you see the number of people spending time on these sites, you are bound to get excited. However, there is still plenty of cynicism in the business world. Facebook is often considered as a plague in the work place: assuming to drain people’s productivity and damaging the business reputation. The caginess of businesses to adopt Facebook, Twitter and their sort got highlighted in the recent survey. If you are still waiting to avail the social media marketing services, then here are some pros and cons that you can consider before implementing social media in your marketing strategy.
➤ Pros of Social Media Marketing
Relation building
The one to one communication that you have in social media makes it an influential platform for building a closer connection with the customers and the brand loyalty.
It’s where your customers are
Facebook isn’t merely domain filled with teenagers, but it has now become a platform which attracts all demographic groups of different ages. In fact, Facebook is most popular among the age group above 55.
Word of mouth or viral marketing
Social media holds the capacity of spreading your messages to thousands of people very quickly as they have a greater market reach worldwide. The exciting thing about social media is that your customers become the channel for you to make your message go viral.
Give your brand personality
Posting messages and video contents on daily basis can upsurge people’s perception towards your brand’s personality in a quick process by your writing styles and tone of voice.
Gain Feedback
You can run polls and ask questions to your audiences to gain valuable insight on how you can enhance your products and services.
Learn more about customers
By listening and participating in the online conversations, you can gather more information about the customer’s problem, likes and dislikes and preferences.
Low cost of entry
Creating profiles on the social media sites like Facebook and Twitter is easy, quick and free of cost. Running paid ads and videos on social sites like Facebook costs very less compared to traditional marketing ad campaigns.
Customer services
People are no more dependent on emails and phones to get their answers to the questions. They now post messages in blogs and forums to get their questions answered. Engaging with social media opens an opportunity for you to respond to the evolving nature of customer services and improves the loyalty as a fruitful outcome.
Crisis marketing
When something goes wrong, your customers will be restless to get the answer as to how you are going to put the things right. Many of them will not even wait for the press releases or newspaper articles before starting to form a negative opinion about your lethargic response. In this scenario, Twitter will be the best option to be used to get you apologies out fast and enables you to answer your customer’s queries.
➤ Cons of Social Media Marketing
Time consuming
Social media is defined as an ‘online conversation’, so the social media marketing companies have to constantly feed the pages and the profile with interesting and enticing comments and links to keep people engaged. The companies have also to monitor the comments and respond to it on daily basis. Being consistently interesting and relevant every time becomes a tough work to be done and is time-consuming.
Long time before ROI
Social media is a long tow strategy, it can take months or even years before it starts showing to translate into increased customer loyalty and sales.
Dilutes brand voice
If there is more than one person posting messages on the social sites, then it can lead to a mish-mash of terminology and tone.
Risk of negative comments
If the social media is used clumsily, then there remains a risk of public backlash and can damage your brand reputation in the online marketing platforms.
Loss control
Whatever you publish on the social media sites is open to comments and criticism. These create an arena for the people to post their negative comments about the company which can take the form of nightmares for the marketers. Hence, you have no control over the comments passed by your audiences. You can only give efforts to post interesting messages and contents, but the rest is out of your control.
Intangible
There is no doubt that online marketing has become an integral part of all businesses, but it lacks the tangible qualities that make the print marketing so popular in this digital age. As per the stats, 92% of shoppers prefer direct mail for taking the purchase decision. And 56% percent of the customers still consider print marketing as the most trustworthy marketing type. Tangible marketing items can last the impression about the product for a longer time comparing to an ad seen online. Because of this reason, tangible marketing tools still hold a strong place in changing the mindset of the customers of purchasing your products and services out of the huge lot.
Hence, social media is omnipresent these days, enduring to evolve as a practicable marketing channel for businesses of any size- start-up to enterprise. Social sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other platforms have made possible to create a bridge to get connected with your customers on a seemingly one to one basis. So, before you hinge to the success of your business on social media, you should understand the pros and cons of the social media and the impact on your business. However, deciding whether to use social networks in your marketing mix comes to the conclusion that whether it is perfect for your business.
It is not a quick fix that will give you a burst of sales, but it does offer you a potential to build a long term relationship with your customers. So if you decide to go with the decision of implementing social media in your business, then you require giving it time to change the conversion rate and the sales figure of the company. And you also need to be vigilant and consistent in offering meaningful and interesting contents.
HEY ! I’m Nil (Founder of OnlineDrifts.com), Digital Marketer, Affiliate Marketer and a blogger writing about blogging tips, SEO, Tech Tips etc.