The 448 million users of social media in India, has opened new avenues for every business to find new leads by using social media marketing. In this article, you will learn everything about social media marketing.
What is meant by social media marketing?
Social media marketing is not limited to posting on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. but in this, the content is designed and developed with an aim to spread brand awareness and meet business goals.
Social media marketing helps in forming two-way communication between the brand and its audience. Today it has become the fastest mode for brand communication.
Like everything has its pros and cons, therefore in the following sections you will learn various merits and demerits of social media marketing to get complete information about it.
Advantages of Social media marketing
Social media marketing provides a huge opportunity for all kinds of industries to seek business growth and establish good brand value. Listed below are the merits of social media marketing.
1. Larger audiences Reach
By using social media marketing one can target the audience across the world and also at the local level. Today millions of people are actively present on various social media sites. As per the statistical report of Clutch, 89% of the population is using Facebook, 83% of the population is on LinkedIn, 81% of the population using YouTube, 80 % of the population uses Twitter and 56% of the population is using Instagram. This gives a great business opportunity to target such a large audience to spread awareness about the brand, its products/services. and as per the report of Backlinko, in India, 47% of the businesses are using various social media platforms to target their audience and finding new leads to grow their businesses.
2. Direct communication with the audience
Social media platforms allow every business to communicate directly with the audience who are interested in their brand/products/services. One can learn about their audience by knowing the followers of the business pages on social media sites. This allows businesses to learn about their audience in a better way, provide better customer services, gain valuable feedback from them, and improve brand image by posting interesting and valuable content pertinent to business goals.
3. Share content at zero cost
On social media sites, marketers can create content in the form of text, photo, and video to connect with the audience without paying a single penny. There is no limitation on posting the content and that is why many companies are using social media marketing to establish brand engagement for free of cost.
4. Paid advertising services
If a company decides to go beyond free posts and gain new leads for the business then every social media platform provides paid advertisement option. The paid advertisement services give an opportunity to acquire new leads who are not even aware of the brand/products/services. This helps in expanding the business reach and boost the conversion rate.
5. Thick traffic over the website
Social media platforms allow the marketers to post the content along with the website link of the company. This helps in diverting the traffic from social media sites on the company’s website where they can learn more about the brand and its products and services. Ultimately more traffic means more business.
7. Access to valuable insights
One of the major advantages of social media is it gives an insight into how the business posts are performing by sharing a total number of views, comments, and likes. This help company in evaluating their marketing campaigns. One of the most common tools, social listening is used by many companies to explore what people feel about their brand and the conversation around it. This help company in offering better product range and services to their customers.
Disadvantages of social media
Every marketing strategy has certain disadvantages that act as a hurdle in doing effective marketing of the business. Given below are the demerits of social media marketing.
1. Negative feedback
Social media serves as a potential ground for people to share their good as well as bad experiences regarding the particular brand its products and services. This acts as negative publicity for the business. The user can share their negative experiences through posting negative reviews on social media or tagging the company’s name and writing a negative post on it. There are bright chances that such posts will be viewed, commented on, and shared across all kinds of social media sites.
The remedy to this is to address the negative review in time and don’t leave people’s concerns and complaints unaddressed.
2. Facing embarrassment
One of the major disadvantages of social media is that in no time any post can become viral very easily. If such a viral post is carrying negative remarks about any brand and it goes unacknowledged by the concerned people of the company then the company will definitely face an embarrassing situation.
The solution to this problem is to act timely over such negative posts by resolving the issues and also do in-depth research before sharing any post on social media to check by no means the post to be perceived in a wrong way by the people or offend them.
3. Time-consuming
Social media marketing requires continuous efforts to create long-lasting relationships with consumers and gain brand loyalty. For this marketing team has to develop new content regularly, post it, monitor its performance, respond to people, and measure the impact of the social media posts. This is a very long and time-consuming process.
The remedy for this problem is to hire professional social media marketing services in case the company is lacking resources or doesn’t have a dedicated team to look after their social media marketing.
4. No immediate results
When companies invest in running social media marketing campaigns, they expect to get immediate results. They want to know that their marketing strategies are working well and it’s really worth investing in social media marketing plans. But that is not how it works. The success of social media marketing strategies can not be predicted by posting one content about the brand. It is determined by the sum total of an effect of the social media marketing campaigns posted over a period of time which may take several weeks to months.
The only solution to this downside of social media is to exercise patience and wait for few months to see the actual results.
If you want to know how social media marketing can help your business? Simply contact us and we will guide you to achieve new business heights through social media marketing.