Let’s Start With the Bright Side – Social Media’s Good:
1) Cost-Effective Marketing
An emphasis on this has been made many times in our earlier blogs. Marketing/advertising on social media starts at less than a couple of hundred rupees. You can run your campaigns for a day or longer, you can schedule your business campaigns to run until your budget gets exhausted, you can choose a specific set of your target audience to whom you want your ads to be visible and you can run cross-platform marketing campaigns. You can do all of this and a lot more at a fraction of the cost you will have to spend on a newspaper ad. Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and also generates 3 times the volume of leads.
2) Brand Identity and Networking
Your business or brand can use the space social media offers to portray yourself in good light and stir awareness among your followers. Social media allows your business to connect with not only with potential customers but also with your competitors. Stand out in what you do and you will draw attention. Imprint a positive persona by running ads, partnering with influencers and creating interactive content. Slowly, your business will gain a loyal network of people on social media. 54% of people use social media to research products before purchasing. So your network of people will become your clients just at the right time.
3) Platform to Voice Your Thoughts
Keeping your clients in the loop is significant to retain them. An easy way to make this happen is through social media. Social media has a number of features like story updates and posts which are common on all platforms. Each platform has unique features which makes it super easy and fun to educate and inform your audience, share your thoughts and engage meaningfully.
4) Way to Your Website
Social media has the option of sharing links to your business website. You can add the link to your caption or on your bio. Facebook has a separate button that you can link to your website. Watch our video on how you can add your website to Facebook. Instagram allows you to add one link on your bio. You can also add swipe up links on stories but unlike Facebook and Twitter, clickable links can’t be attached to captions on Instagram.
Here Is the Flip Side of Social Media – The Bad:
1) Easy to Get Lost In the Crowd
In 2019, 45% of the population (3.5 billion) were users of social media out of which 71% small to medium scale businesses use social media to market themselves. The numbers are huge and growing. That makes it complicated to stand out among the crowd and draw attention towards your brand or business. The combined effort of content creators, social media strategists and digital marketers with a personalized plan of action is the way to distinguish yourself.
2) Requires Resources to Run
A simple story updation on social media requires resources for execution. Specialized people are required to decide what has to go up on your social media accounts, to implement the ideas on screen, to handle your account and upload posts with appropriate hashtags and to monitor its performance. Most strategists and marketers these days are well-versed with all these aspects.
3) Constantly Changing Trends
“Binod” went viral a few weeks ago. “Rasode me kaun tha”, a few weeks earlier and the ban on PUB-G and Akshay Kumar’s FAU-G. Major brands on social create content that relates the most trending topics with their brands in order to show their participation to what the audience wants to see. So many issues go viral that sometimes it becomes difficult to keep track of what they are, connect them to your business/brand and analyze if your audience will like it.
Social Media Can Get Destructive – The Ugly:
1) Bad Press
Negative publicity is when you get noticed and go viral but for all the wrong reasons. A classic example is Subway’s too short footlong. In 2013 on social media, they claimed that they sell subs that are one foot long i.e. 12 inches. An Australian teenager put it out that his sub was only 11 inches long with sufficient proof. Subway ended up losing half a million dollars in court.
Social media when used carelessly for businesses can get really ugly. It has to be cautiously used as giving it a miss is not a luxury any business can afford. Do you want to set up social media profiles for your business? Read our blog that guides you through setting up your social presence. If you are doubtful about strategizing and creating content yourself, calm yourself. Talk to our team for personalized solutions.
