Advantages and Disadvantages of Social Media Marketing (2022)

Social media has been something that billions of people have involved themselves with ever since it was created. It became an avenue for brands and other enterprises to promote and sell their goods and services. It has also become a platform for businesses to engage with their customers and discover potential clients. Social media revolutionized digital marketing and allowed brands to be humanized in a way that they can be able to communicate more casually and interactively. 

However, nothing comes without its share of pros and cons, and social networking sites are great examples. As of writing, the economic advantages and disadvantages of social media are a hotly debated topic. With over four billion active users, social media has really become a phenomenon, especially since its user average has risen dramatically over the years.

Marketers and business owners have leveraged the advantages of social media as it is accessible now more than ever by it being available on both mobile and desktop devices. The mere reading, commenting, and reviewing of your products on social media pages have made users and consumers become a part of the marketing strategy itself — which is why engagement is a fundamental part of social media marketing. 

Nonetheless, the most significant contribution of social media is its platform to grow a company’s reach and provide more career opportunities. It only illustrates how relevant social media marketing is. 

Read further into this article to fully understand the role of social media in digital marketing and to be aware of the advantages and disadvantages of social media. 

The Role of Social Media in Marketing

Learning to fully understand the role of social media is important for your business. Keep in mind that there are over four billion active social media users all over the world. So if you do make the most out of this information and apply it in your digital marketing strategy, then you would be missing out on an affordable, fast, and efficient way to connect to almost half of the world’s entire population.

But above all else, you can only determine the effectiveness of a social media marketing strategy once it makes an impact on your business goals. Regardless, social media marketing has produced promising results for most businesses despite the erratic pattern of consumer behavior.

1. Reach

The most frequently stated role of social media is to widen your business’ reach. Reach refers to the overall number of individuals who have seen your content. Before social media became a craze, marketers utilized their personal connections, networks, and other conventional marketing strategies. But now, we can easily locate our targeted clients on the digital platform, all thanks to social media marketing. Really, the role of social media in marketing is to reach your audiences by using basic automation.

2. Increase Website Traffic

Another key role of social media in marketing is to increase web traffic. Visitors that arrive on your website through platforms such as various social media sites, Google, direct traffic, and others are referred to as online traffic. After Google’s organic search, social media is the second-highest avenue for generating online traffic. It is treated as one of the most important factors in the growth of website traffic. In addition, when it comes to ranking on the first page of a search engine’s results page, it is quite competitive, time-consuming, and needs a lot of effort in optimizing. So the use of social media in marketing is gaining a lot of traction as a means of targeting the correct audience.

3. Customer Engagement

If you don’t engage with your target audience, the aforementioned two roles of social media in marketing can be deemed to be useless. You have to make sure that your published materials for your social media accounts can be relevant or at least provide value to your intended audience, whether it be an ad, a video, or a post — apart from it being visually pleasing. In effect, it will pique your potential customer’s interest and eventually be encouraged to interact with your post through the comments or even as a shared post. In marketing, customer engagement is the most important job or role of social media. 

4. Content Promotion and Product Launches

A normal person spends at least two hours a day on social media, so if you promote and launch your products to them at the busiest of the social networking site time, then it would most likely be seen. Being involved in the marketing game for quite a significant period of time, I suggest you promote your products on social media in order to engage with your target market. But before doing so, you have to produce quality content first, be it in the form of video, text, or graphics.

5. Remarketing

One of the most common strategies of marketers is to repost their products or other services from their company’s website to their social media accounts in the form of ads. Because of social media’s massive visibility, remarketing your products there can be beneficial for you since the possible reach has expanded — allowing customers to buzz about your offerings. Customer engagement is crucial in order for a business to progress. Thus, when you remarket your services on social media, you allow potential consumers to contemplate purchasing from you.

Advantages of Using Social Media

While many believed that social media was just a quick fad, it has revealed itself to be something that has no end in sight. As a result, using social media to market your business should be an easy call. A long list can go on with regard to the advantages and disadvantages of social media, but let us first discuss the benefits you can get when you leverage it.

1. Increased Brand Awareness

One of the least costly digital marketing strategies for sharing your materials and increasing your company’s exposure to your target market is social media. Due to its power to influence and connect a large audience, planning a specific marketing strategy for it will for certain dramatically boost your brand awareness. Each shared post will expose a new network of people to your company, perhaps resulting in new clients, and the more aware people, the better for your business.

2. Improved Search Engine Rankings

There is no doubt that posting on social media can significantly help your business gain an ample amount of website traffic, but it isn’t enough to see major results. Search engine optimization (SEO) can be a very good method to improve your search engine results page (SERP) ranking and essentially prompt more traffic towards your website. Even if social media usage does not directly correlate to an increase in SERPs ranking, it, however, has been proven to be a factor in boosting SERPs ranking when fully exhausted for at least a year or so, according to marketers.

Invest in creating high-quality content like blogs that incorporate your desired keywords and also provide information about your business and key employees through infographics in order to build credibility and brand authority. You can then share them on your social media accounts for more reach. By doing so, you can start building a social media community through the people who engage in your content. The summation of all these efforts can get people to link back to your website, boosting your search engine rankings inevitably.

3. Cost-Effective

Perhaps utilizing social media can arguably be the most cost-effective strategy of digital marketing. There is no need for you to release a lump sum of money for a simple marketing strategy when using social media as a tool. Almost all social networking sites allow you to create profiles and sign up for free, and if you ever want to release some sponsored ads, it is relatively more inexpensive in comparison to other marketing methods. Implementing your marketing strategies through social media is cost-effective for you as it allows you to get an inflated rate of return on your investment, and as a result, you have more funds to allocate to your other marketing and company needs. 

4. Better Customer Satisfaction

Social media is a platform for communication, engagement, and networking. It has become a way for your company to be more relatable and approachable to your target market. Through social media, customers are freer to give comments or reviews about the services and products that you offer, and in the same manner, you can also answer them as easily. Because of this, your customers feel more heard as you recognize their feedback and have demonstrated that you are open to their suggestions. In effect, social media has contributed to better customer satisfaction.

Disadvantages of Using Social Media

It has been established that social media plays a key role in marketing and offers really promising benefits. However, in this article, we will also share some drawbacks of social media — this is not to discourage you from utilizing it as a marketing strategy but for you to be more prepared for the possible setbacks it may bring. Moreover, considering both the advantages and disadvantages of social media can assist you in determining the ideal social media strategy for your company.

1. Time-Consuming

Marketing through exploiting the positive effects of social media can be rather a slow process if you are someone who wants everything to produce quick results. Furthermore, it demands a lot of consistency from you in terms of producing quality content. If you are still a new business, people may purposefully disregard your page, so it is required to post as frequently as you can in the most appropriate time when a lot of people are online for you to gain more exposure.

2. Low Return On Investment

Another drawback of using social media as a marketing strategy is its low return on investment. For you to gain success in this, you must devote effort, time, and money to producing quality materials and ads. There is little harm in using social media, but you must be aware of this so that you won’t have high expectations.

3. Risk of Security Breach

Growing together with the advancement of technology are cyber hackers and other data stealers. Despite the rigid security encryptions created by the developers of social media networking sites to assure that all information of its members is safe, sometimes it can still be vulnerable to be breached by hackers. Once these hackers get hold of your pages, they may taint your reputation or compromise your data. However, this disadvantage is not only present across social media. It can also be done to your website or anything that is on the internet. More so, although this disadvantage might rarely happen, it still can put your company at stake.

4. Vulnerability to Misinformation

With social media being so within reach to everyone who has devices, it has been a breeding ground for false information. A single misinformed post about your brand could potentially spread all throughout the world and damage your reputation. In effect, it may cost you possible leads and sales.

Conclusion:

Indeed, the advantages and disadvantages of social media could either make or break your brand, but nothing comes without risks, right? We suggest that you study your marketing strategies first for social media to reduce possible untoward effects. If you are not so certain about how to manage your social media accounts, you may acquire services from SMARTVAs. SMARTVAs is a virtual assistance agency that has competent and experienced social media strategists who can aid you with your social media needs.