Digital Marketing: Advantages & Disadvantages Of Social Media
Social media has established itself as a marketing tool to connect and converse with your audience, as well as influence their buying preferences.
Promoting a brand, product or service through social media has become a very common and relevant practice. Opening a social profile is free, but managing it requires an investment of time and money. Therefore, it is important to consider the most important advantages, as well as the less positive points.
Companies have to know how to make good use of social media, the problem is that there are still many organizations that are not clear whether they have to be or not.
What are the advantages of social networks?
1. You can advertise at a lower cost
Thanks to social media, you can advertise at a lower cost than other channels such as Google Adwords. In addition, they are a great tool not only to reach people who do not know you, but also to impact people with whom you already have a relationship with the goal of building loyalty.
2. Improving a brand’s online reputation
Brands that use social media inspire more trust. It allows to create, know and build loyalty to a community. Having a strong personal brand is essential to differentiate yourselves both personally and professionally. Thanks to social media, you will be able to enhance your personal brand as the networks can act as a “loudspeaker” when it comes to disseminating your content, and thus be able to reach a greater number of people.
3. Easier measurement of results
The good thing about social media and, in general, digital marketing is that they allow you to measure practically all the actions you carry out to know whether you are meeting your objectives or not. This is one of the main advantages of social media for professionals, since offline actions are more difficult to measure, but if you combine both on and off actions the results obtained by the company can be really good.
What are the disadvantages of social networks?
1. Success is only achieved in the long term
With exceptions such as celebrities and gurus, your social profiles and content sites will not generate much traffic from the start. Growth is palpable if you generate content on a constant basis. We are talking about several months to get followers, readers, subscribers, friends and new people to talk to.
2. Content expires fast
In search engines, content and the page that hosts it, usually remains permanently indexed. In social networks everything goes very fast and a tweet announcing a new and wonderful article is quickly lost in the timeline of your followers. The same happens on the Facebook wall and in group posts on LinkedIn. Social media updates, as a fact of its natural functioning, causes content to expire quickly.
3. It does not work without content
The strategy of creating and disseminating content is basic — articles, videos, memes, infographics, comments etc. are necessary and must be generated frequently. The big goal is to drive people to your sites, but to do that you have to provoke that desire through the promise of good content. That good content is generated through experience, imagination, knowledge and, above all, time.
