The impact that social media has had on the world especially millennial’s is one that cannot be ignored. Over the past ten years or so of its existence, we have seen it move from a millennial’s leisure thing to a tried and tested socialising platform for everyone including the older generations.
Best of all, it has turned out to be the most effective marketing channel for businesses both in B2C and B2B marketing.
Just like any other technological advancement, social media has its share of pros and cons. This article is dedicated to assisting you to understand the strengths of social media, the weaknesses, and how you can tweak the weaknesses to your advantage.
Why?
It depends on whether you are selling items online, want to be an influencer, affiliate marketer, or to start a digital marketing agency.
Social Media – Positives
#1 Easy reach to a large audience
This works for both individuals and businesses. SM gives instant reach to more than 2.5 billion users worldwide. In the United States alone, 77 percent of Americans have a social profile with the two mostly subscribed to platforms being YouTube and Facebook.
The question is, how do individuals and businesses take advantage of such a huge audience potential? Well, its quite simple, platforms such as Facebook provide audience analysis tools for sorting out audiences that love different topics and niches.
With such an analysis, businesses can specifically target niche audiences for ads and other forms of marketing.
Individuals like you and me, on the other hand, can grow social profiles and accounts by targeting audiences that follow specific niches. Money starts following immediately as you grow your account and introduce various affiliate marketing and sponsorships.
#2 Building Relationships
Social media is an excellent place for building relationships. It allows businesses to actively interact with their customers, respond to arising concerns, and identify potential opportunities by analysing customer complaints.
On the side of individuals, these platforms make it easy to connect and interact with strangers. All you need to do is accept a follow from a stranger on Instagram or Facebook and you can start chatting about almost everything.
Additionally, it eliminates global boundaries making it easy to interact with people from all over the world. You want to learn about different cultures and nations? Social networks are the perfect place.
#3 Increased Exposure
Nowadays, it’s so easy to know what’s trending. All thanks to social media. By just logging in to your Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter news feed, you can find all the news at your fingertips.
Is this at all important? Definitely! While most of the news will be nothing but worthless gossip, sometime you might come across news that might be important; for example, accident warnings, or even potential fashion trends that you can take advantage of and make money from.
The most important thing is sorting gossip and noise from important news.
#4 Instant Connection
To some of you, this might sound like a disadvantage but I guarantee you it’s not. The benefit significantly outweighs the limitation.
The ability to connect anytime allows you to identify the most current news and information at any time of day or night.
Let’s assume you are attending a conference you are completely unfamiliar with. By logging into your social media account and searching the conference’s hashtag, you can learn all you need to know about the conference, the speaker, objectives, and even about the attendees.
Social media is a land of new unexploited opportunities. Take maximum advantage of it to grow yourself.
#5 Unlimited Earning Potential
This should have actually been the first point. Social media provides unlimited earning potentials for both businesses and individuals. And best of all, you don’t need thousands of dollars to get started.
Individuals can effortlessly make money on social media through affiliate marketing, social media management, social media advertising for both digital and physical products, and social media advertising agencies.
In the case of affiliate marketing, you only need to grow your account and companies will start approaching you to advertise their products on your social media account.
Selling and advertising has never been easier. Social media has made it so easy to market and sell both products and services through customer targeting. Best of all, it is extremely cheap and you don’t need any skills.
Cons of Using Social Media
#1 Negative Feedback
Social media provides anonymity and a platform where communication can be easily done without physical contact. With just a click of a button, anyone can type an ignorant negative comment whose effect could be the loss of hundreds of customers.
Just like it’s easy to win customers on social media, it is similarly easy to lose more in a blink of an eye.
Well, there is nothing that can be done to solve this. All you can do is try as much as possible to provide the best quality content and services on your profile. In the case of negative comments, the best thing is ignoring them.
#2 Privacy and Security Issues
Nowadays, it is so easy for your private information to be accessed by unauthorised third parties. Part of these security issues include fraud and scams, blackmails, and destroyed a reputation in the case of such information landing in the wrong hands.
These are just a few of the disadvantages of using social media. Others include; cyber-bullying, cheating and relationship issues, hacking, and health issues such as increased laziness.
#3 Time Wasting and Addiction
The most obvious disadvantage of using social media is time-wasting. Growing your social media presence requires time; a lot of time!
You have to keep on logging in to your Facebook or Instagram account, follow people, make posts, like and comment on other people’s content for them to follow you. It gets even worse if you are a business owner or a busy person who barely gets time for chatting leave alone commenting and liking images and videos.
But does this mean that you shy away from growing your social media account?
Absolutely not!
There are numerous websites offering social media management and scheduling options for planning your social media life. The best one is the cloud app from EasySocio.
EasySocio offers web-based software that allows you to schedule your social media posts and publishes them on multiple social media accounts automatically.
All you need to do is prepare all the posts you want to publish for a whole week during the weekend, update them on EasySocio Cloud App, and they will be published automagically to your account on the date and time you set.
Additionally, you can request for social media management services. Digital marketing experts will do all the social media management for you including searching for content, publishing it, and growing your following on whatever platform you wish.
Conclusion
Every technological advancement has its share of pros and cons. Social media is no different. In as much as we would like to hate social media for all the negative effects, we have to accept the fact that social media is here to stay.
The best we can do is adapt and use its strengths to our advantage.