Pros and Cons to Social Media: Impact on Advertisers and General User

With over 3.81 billion active users and a 9.2% yearly increase, social media has grown from a means of staying in touch with people into a thriving marketplace for business.  Now the ecommerce social media is the practice to advertise, maintain the brand presence of online store and generate leads through social media. There are several pros to social media, but it is not without cons.

In recent years, social media marketing (SMM) has been the lifeline of several brands, and more businesses are starting to make it a part of their marketing strategy.

Social media marketing’s success often comes down to whether you have an efficient strategy. Many businesses rely on organic traffic on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. However, you can achieve your goals faster by running ad campaigns on these platforms.

In this article, we’ll take a look at the pros and cons to social media and help you determine if it makes sense for your business goals.

Pros to Social Media Marketing For Advertisers

First up, we’ll explore the benefits of social media marketing. Here are eight reasons social media marketing is a good idea for modern businesses:

1. Low Marketing Cost

One significant advantage of social media marketing (SMM) is that the cost of advertising a business is significantly lower compared to traditional advertising. You can join social media platforms and use the engagement tools they have for free.

2. Unlimited Reach

Traditional advertising only promotes businesses to a specific audience – for example, people who watch a particular TV channel, read a specific magazine, etc. By comparison, social media advertising can reach an unlimited number of people, even beyond your primary target demographic. As a result, your business can reach a broader audience and increase your brand awareness, sales, and traffic.

3. Audience Connection

Social media allows you to connect with your audience on a deeper, more personal level, which presents several benefits:

Understand your audience better – When you know your audience, their pain points, and challenges, you can deliver insightful content that resonates with them. This connection will help you create tailored content aimed at the precise needs of your audience, which elicits higher engagement.

Deliver better customer service – You can have direct conversations with customers on social media, respond to their queries, offer top-notch customer service that gets referrals, increase trust, and generate more sales.

Know your audience’s thoughts about your brand – Direct and indirect reviews and feedback are necessary for brand growth. Social media makes it easy to know what your audience thinks about your brand and marketing efforts. With this information, you’ll know the strategy to work on, what to improve, and what problems they need solutions to.

4. Fast Action and Results

Social media is one of the easiest and fastest ways to reach your audience. It’s easy to publish a post on a social media platform. If it goes viral, you can get high engagement and brand awareness in return for relatively little effort. The insights social media platforms allow you to know when your audience is active and what type of content they engage.

5. Long-Term Relationship

It’s hard to build long-term relationships with customers from traditional advertising, as you don’t have access to the detailed data when you advertise in a newspaper or billboard.

With social media marketing, you can perform analysis to determine which channels site visitors come from. For example, you might find that many people land on your site after watching a YouTube video or after visiting your Facebook page. By analyzing the customer journey, you can work harder on the platforms that show the most promise to build stronger relationships with your customers where they are the most active.

6. Brand Loyalty

Constant engagement with your audience on social media can encourage brand loyalty. When you have meaningful interactions with them, your brand becomes a go-to choice. This builds your online reputation, credibility as a business and nurtures trust among customers.

7. High Conversion Rate

Social media increases brand visibility, which, in turn, leads to a high conversion rate. Most popular platforms offer businesses multiple opportunities to promote their business to a wide range of users – through posts, stories, direct messages, lives, videos, groups, hashtags, and ads.

All these features can lead potential customers to your website or online shop, where they can make a purchase, subscribe to your list, or take any other action you want them to.

8. Customer Service

Social media is one of the best ways to get referrals. If you deliver services or products to your customers, ask them for feedback. Getting customer feedback is crucial, as it tells you how well you’re doing and what you need to improve to offer a better customer experience.

Furthermore, you can post good reviews on your social media pages and website to serve as valuable social proof, which will encourage other prospects to trust your brand.

Cons to Social Media Marketing for Advertisers

Unfortunately, it’s not all good. Here are few disadvantages of social media from an advertisers’ perspective:

1. Time Consumption

It is important to maintain your profiles and pages, respond to comments regularly, and engage with your audience. All of this administration takes a long time, as you are constantly creating content for social media.

Businesses often hire social media managers to manage their presence on social platforms. If you manage your accounts yourself, you’ll have to dedicate a lot of time to maintain a consistent flow of valuable content on all channels.

2. Negativity and Unprofessional Competitors

A huge issue on social media is the proliferation of scammers, trolls, and hackers. While many people enjoy the platforms for staying in touch or promoting businesses in an honest and respectable way, many users try to exploit or harass people and businesses online.

This problem can come in the form of rude comments or slanderous messages, or it may go as far as someone launching a cyber-attack to hack into your account or attempt to steal sensitive information.

Sometimes, you may even find that the perpetrator happens to be one of your competitors. Ideally, businesses will act professionally on social media and use strategy and smart advertising to stand out from the crowd. However, it is not unheard of for a company to resort to negative tactics to tarnish their rivals’ names.

3. Lack of Control

Social media offers many marketing tools to grow your brand, but you must remember that you have limited control over the results. You can post whatever content you want and use targeting filters to improve the ROI. However, you cannot guarantee certain things, such as:

• How the algorithm will show your content to platform users.
• If you will get quality engagement – likes, follows, shares, comments, and clicks.
• If you will receive consistent engagement.
• That the people who see your posts and paid ads are indeed your audience, with relevant needs and interests.

Although, many platforms trying to provide maximum control to users sometimes lack of knowledge on user end may jeopardize the things.

4. Delayed Results (For Long-term Strategy)

Social media marketing is one of the fastest ways to make quick sales. However, if you’re interested in long-term benefits like customer loyalty, brand influence, customer, and considerable return-on-investment (ROI), you need to consider a long-term strategy as well.

When it comes to social media, there are two types of ROI:

• Financial ROI: This refers to the profit you make on a specific campaign you run on a social media platform.
• Social ROI: This is the increase in the engagement rate of your profile, as in the likes, comments, shares, and followers you receive.

You can build a strong relationship with your audience and brand authority using social media marketing, but it takes commitment, a lot of time and effort to achieve results.

5. Limited Platforms

Although social media can reach a vast audience, marketing is limited to social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or Twitter etc. If any of these platforms crash, your marketing efforts suffer. Similarly, you can only reach people with accounts on those platforms–missing out on potential customers who don’t use social media.

This is unlike Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or Search Engine Marketing (SEM), where your business is promoted on a universal scale, directing traffic to a website that you own.

Pros to Social Media for General Users

So, now that we’ve covered the pros and cons for advertisers let’s take a look at the other side of the coin. Here are few pros of social media for general users, including your customers:

1. Easy Networking

The primary goal of social media is to bring people together. Diverse people from diverse countries, races, backgrounds, academic levels, and religious sects can connect and build relationships on social media.

You can get in touch with anyone, comment on their posts, become buddies, chat, send audio recordings, and become friends with them. Many users come together to form real-life friendships, new businesses, and niche interest groups on social media platforms.

2. Access to Education

Social media educates users on several topics—mental health, lifestyle, business, finance, etc. Irrespective of your location, you can always learn things to make your life and business better free of charge. Many people use social media as their news source, while others leverage the availability of free information and peer learning. For example, on LinkedIn, many people find mentors and network with experienced professionals in their fields.

3. Real-time information and News

You can find the latest trends and news updates around the world from social media. Nowadays, it’s easy for anyone to record an event and post it online. While the majority of this information and updates present raw, undiluted facts, social media serves as a platform for real-time news updates that are faster than any TV news stations or traditional print media.

4. Accessible Business Promotion

It is free to showcase your business on social media platforms. The potential reach is limitless–although organic reach is suffering due to the intense competition now online.

But, with a smart strategy and consistent approach to marketing on social media, you can promote your brand and connect with your audience from anywhere in the world. This reduces the cost of paid ads, builds your credibility, and helps you earn more traffic, leads, and sales.

5. Get Support for Worthy Causes

It’s not all business, as you can use social media to promote non-profit organizations and charitable campaigns. For example, suppose you are raising money for a noble cause, such as an environmental movement, or helping people in underprivileged countries. In that case, social media is the perfect platform to spread your message.

Social media acts as a loudspeaker to create awareness on just about any topic, whether it’s a needy cause or something that can make people’s lives better.

6. Job Opportunities

It is easy to find jobs on social media platforms. In social networks like Linkedin, Twitter, FB groups, you can find job listings and requests for specific skills. Moreover, consistently posting relevant content that makes your skills evident to your target industry is an effective long-term strategy to get jobs.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, remote working is on the rise. Therefore, social media is now one of the best places to find your next career move.

Cons of Social Media for General Users

Just as with business, general users will find there are a few unfortunate truths about social media. Here are few problems that we must deal with on social media:

1. Cyberbullying

Social media has become a place where criticism and harassment are rife. Since anyone can easily create an account, it’s easy for malicious users to target and bully people online. Over the years, several users have been victims of cyberbullying.

People get threatened, trolled, rumored, and mocked, and the repercussions can sometimes be dire, leading to mental health issues, including stress, anxiety, and even depression. Sadly, many suicides have been attributed to cyberbullying, particularly in teenage girls.

Unfortunately, with billions of users and many fake profiles on these platforms, it’s almost impossible for the administrators to police this ongoing problem.

2. Hacking

Profiles, personal information, and privacy can easily be hacked on social media. In the past, hacking incidents have compromised people’s bank accounts, reputation, and property.

Hackers can steal your identity, share negative info about your life or business, and demand unsolicited payments. This threat is why it is advised to use two-factor authentication.

3. Social Media Addiction

In the mobile-technology age, many people are genuinely addicted to social media. It’s much more than messaging and communications now, as social media offers video content, games, interactive content, and of course, the vanity metrics of getting comments, likes, and shares on your posts.

For some people, this is a compelling combination that keeps them engaged, even when they should be at work or spending quality time with their family or friends. Not only does this affect our real-life relationships, but it also impacts productivity at school or work.

4. Confidentiality Issues

Privacy and data security are top priorities now, especially with the growth of ecommerce and mobile shopping. People want to do more business online, but they also want their personal information to remain private.

Many people now understand the need for companies to track online user behavior, as it can be used for remarketing purposes, so we see personalized product recommendations and tailored ads. However, incidents like the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where Facebook reportedly sold the personal data of millions of user accounts, do little to engender trust with people.

5. Threat to Reputation

Just as a company can use social media to build a good reputation, their public image can easily be destroyed by a public furor on social media. A bad reaction to a campaign may portray a company in a negative light, which deters people from buying from the company.

Similarly, everyday users can suffer at the hands of negative reviews or comments online. Some backlash or falling out with another user online in a group forum or public thread may change how others perceive you online and could affect how other people engage with you on the platform in the future.

6. Health Issues

As mentioned earlier, cyberbullying can contribute to a range of various health issues. However, social media can be harmful, even if other users aren’t targeting you.

If you are constantly browsing on social media, playing games, or posting content for your business or blog, it’s easy to get carried away by the digital world and forget to take proper care of yourself. You might go to bed later, miss out on proper meals, or may not get enough exercise.

Another issue is the unrealistic or unattainable representation of beauty and success that we often see on social media. Young people look up to celebrities and social media influencers and may feel inadequate in comparison. The competition among their peers to get more likes on their photos may seem innocuous to some, but this vanity metric is a real issue that causes anxiety and stress for many people.

Wrap Up

Although social media has its cons, the pros generally outweigh them. That being said, we can’t ignore the perils of these platforms.

Many people love social media because it connects them with friends, professionals, and potential customers that value them and their products. With a good strategy and an open mind, you can use social media to build support for any business, event, or campaign.

Most businesses use social media marketing to drive toward their goals of brand awareness, lead generation, and increasing profit. If you’re not using social media yet, incorporate it into your marketing strategy soon to add to your omnichannel experience.

You can learn more about which platform is better: Facebook Ads or Google Ads for better ROI.