Advantages and Disadvantages of Social Media Marketing

advantages of social media marketing

The benefits of using social media for marketing have changed the marketing world a lot. Social media platforms of all kinds allow people to interface with friends in real-time. The advantages of social media marketing give people the chance to express themselves by using pictures and videos.

There are countless advantages and disadvantages of social media marketing and businesses have been using the advantages for long. In this blog, we will discuss the pros and cons of social media marketing thoroughly.

Advantages of Social Media Marketing

One of the biggest benefits of using social media marketing for marketing is its capacity to help you reach millions of people from all over the globe. Businesses can generate a bigger audience regardless of region, country, city, or locality. Here are all the advantages of social media marketing. 

1. You Can Target Larger Audience Base

As of late 2020, these are the audience base for the largest social media are such as:

  • Facebook: 1.82 billion users
  • YouTube: 2 billion users
  • Twitter: 330 million users
  • Instagram: 112.5 million users
  • LinkedIn: 303 million users

Imagine what would happen if a business can access even 1% of all the audience. As the number of people on social media is growing day by day, businesses can use that to their advantage. This means that there is a massive opportunity for you to target different users for different age categories. It is one of the benefits of using social media for marketing.

2. Customizable Advertisements

What makes social media marketing a great option is the customizations for advertisements. For example, almost all social media platforms allow you to select your daily ad budget and choose your target audience based on location, age, and likes. 

Some of the ad customization options have evolved so much that businesses can enjoy all the benefits of using social media for marketing. Here are examples of ad customization options offered by Facebook and Instagram. 

  • Facebook

You can advertise to your target demographic on Facebook based on where they live, their gender, their age, job title, political choices. That’s not all, you can go even more detailed such as birthday, graduation, engagement date, or wedding anniversary. You can target users based on their shopping behaviors, interests, activities, and the pages they have liked. 

  • Instagram

Instagram is the second most famous platform for social media advertising, it allows you to target people based on their age category, city, state, and country. Businesses can even set their daily ad budget and select the number of people you want to target. 

3. Social Media Marketing is Cost-Effective

Another advantage of social media marketing is that it is very cost-effective. If you compare conventional advertisement methods with social media marketing, then it is very budget-friendly. Unfortunately, it is only budget effective for those who know what they are doing. 

Social media advertising is best mastered by those who have experience in the field. If you don’t manage your advertisements well, then you can go through your marketing budget quickly. However, as social media marketing is comparatively cheaper than other forms of marketing, you need to find a marketing tactic that works at a budget price.

4. Increases Traffic on Your Website

One of the benefits of using social media for marketing is that it helps you attract an audience to your website through creative options. You can use social media to grow your website traffic tenfold. All you have to do is to make sure that your landing page is ideal for your user’s needs. To make this happen, you need to generate incredible content that showcases the benefits of your product and services. Having a great landing page will enhance user experience which will go on to further grow your website from your social media profiles. 

You can even take things one step further by optimizing all your website pages, especially your product and services pages. This will encourage the visitors on your website to go through all your pages and buy your product and services. 

5. You Can Uncover Valuable Customer Insights

Leaving your competitors behind in the race for more customers is all about understanding the customer psyche and behavior. With the help of various advertising tools, you will have to access this information about your customers that you can use for making a brilliant advertisement campaign.

The advantages of social media marketing are that you can track the performance of your social media campaigns and understand how users are interacting with your ads. If you can understand what doesn’t works, then you can make ad campaigns that can help you get the best advantages of social media marketing.

Disadvantages of Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing, regardless of all its benefits, has its low points as well. Just like everything, there are both advantages and disadvantages of social media marketing. Here are all the disadvantages of social media marketing.

1. Time & Effort Consuming Process

Despite its countless advantages, social media has many disadvantages. One of the most significant disadvantages of social media marketing is that it takes a lot of time to build a huge audience. It takes effort, and a lot of patience and practice to perfect it. 

To get followers, you need to gather likes, comments, and share on your posts. Engagement on your post is one of the best ways to gather followers. You need to derive an innovative strategy, create content, post it, and engage with your audience daily. 

All of this requires dedicated effort, planning, and a long-term strategy and you need to plan your social media calendar months in advance and make time for regular updates on social media. As most organizations don’t have either the time or resources to follow up on your social media marketing strategy in-house, you can find the best digital marketing organization.

2. Slow Return on Investments

One of the biggest disadvantages of social media marketing is that it takes a long time to get the results you want. Another social media marketing drawback is that you won’t see immediate results as it takes a long time to perfect your strategy. 

The success of your social media marketing efforts depends on how your campaigns perform. You will need to post multiple content pieces over a considerable time period, track their performance, and evaluate how each post works. Following these steps will help you evaluate the effectiveness of your social media marketing strategy. 

If you are a small scale business that doesn’t have the time and resources to pull off the SMM strategy then you can either choose to outsource.

After all, the results of an SMM campaign can be huge and you don’t want to be impatient while growing your business over time.

3. Exposure to Competitors

Other disadvantages of social media marketing are that nothing is private. All business accounts on social media are open to all social media users. 

The problem is that everyone can copy each other’s social media strategy. While your competitors can copy your strategy, you can copy theirs if they have a better strategy. This means that your business stands the risk of being copied out of its social media marketing strategy. 

The only way to get rid of this is to be as innovative as possible and to keep changing your strategy over time. As social media is basically open from all ends, you have to find keep changing your strategy so that your competitors don’t copy your style.

4. Susceptible to Negative Feedback

Social media marketing is a completely open platform for social sharing and everyone can share their thoughts and experiences on these platforms. This is one of the biggest disadvantages of social media marketing as businesses and brands are open to the risk of receiving negative feedback from their customers. 

On the other hand, excessive negative comments can definitely ruin your brand reputation. If similar problems are amplified, you can lose your audience by a lot. Let’s say that a big influencer says something negative about your brand, you can lose a huge follower count quickly. 

On other hand, you can take negative comments received from your users and turn them into a positive for your brand. All the negative comments can help you track audience sentiment about your brand, all this can help you understand where your product and services are falling behind and how you can improve them. 

The advantages and disadvantages of social media marketing revolve around the platforms being open-ended.

5. Potential PR Nightmare

Unfortunately, nothing ever gets deleted from the social media platforms. This means you should be careful about what you post on the platform. Social activism and political correctness are becoming a part of the social media marketing strategy for businesses so you need to care for that as well. 

If you have a huge audience base, then posting contentious stuff can cause you a lot of harm. You can ruin your brand reputation completely. 

Even if you want to delete the post, it won’t change the damage done. The whole issue can spiral out of control and transform into a huge public relations scandal. This can lead to bad press and you may end up losing a lot of business.

6. Security and Privacy Policy Issues

Other major disadvantages of social media marketing are all the security and privacy policy issues. When you sign up as an advertiser on all social media platforms, you are required to surrender both private and public information. This makes your brand vulnerable to data leaks from hundreds of thousands of hackers lurking behind the screens.

Conclusion: Pros and Cons of Social Media Marketing 

These are all the advantages and disadvantages of social media marketing in this blog. We believe that despite its potential drawbacks and risks, social media marketing is an incredible tool if used perfectly. If you’re a business owner, you should make full use of the benefits of using social media for marketing. 

You can’t keep your business afloat without having a huge social media presence. All your competitors will be doing their best to build their social media presence and you need to do the same. If you fail to do so then chances are you will be missing out on a lot of potential business. 

No business can afford to stay afloat without the help of social media platforms. We suggest that you build a social media strategy and stick to it. Keep the advantages and disadvantages of social media marketing in mind and you will do perfectly.

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