Opportunities and Challenges in the Social Media Space for Businesses

In the ever evolving social marketing space, there are always new opportunities coming to businesses and marketers, all bringing new challenges along with them. Below are some of the overarching opportunities and challenges that marketers will face in the space.

New Social Advertising Units

Opportunity: Advertising opportunities are arising all over the place with new integrations, buttons and tools mainly driven by social networks. From buy buttons to new partner integrations on Twitter, Pinterest or LinkedIn, the appearance of these units offers new ways to drive business objectives via the social channel.

Challenge: At the same time, the rapid pace of deployment also means that businesses and marketers have to keep up with the latest updates. It’s tough to devise an effective strategy including details like required minimum budgets, the best deployment paths, or even truly understanding if these units have been tested. Marketers have to test the new environment without losing focus on their current strategy and existing social communities.

New Social Networking Channels

Opportunity: Mobile devices and applications have enabled even more channels for businesses to reach and engage with their target audience.

Challenge: Identifying which applications make sense to try and implement in their strategy will mean that businesses have to rely on data, their objectives and expertise to ensure they are well positioned. Given the novelty of these networks in analytics, some businesses may decide to postpone their involvement based on resources or business priorities.

New Video Formats

Opportunity: The proliferation of video creation tools has seen social networks battle it out by rewarding video content through increased visibility in feeds. Video content has generally performed better at a lower Cost per Engagement when comparing to other forms of content posted on channels.

Challenge: This opportunity comes with an obvious challenge on how to create effective video, on a consistent basis. This will lead to increased content creation budgets for social. Additionally, with recent announcements of platforms adding live streaming capabilities — social media marketers will need to be aware across broader marketing efforts to be able to further leverage media partnerships, collaborations, and events that may help create more engaging video content.

Overall, marketers must approach these opportunities with an open-mind and realistic expectations on the implications and challenges these opportunities may create.