Advantages and Disadvantages of Social Media

With the widespread popularity of various social media platforms and the tough competition amongst them, it has become almost impossible to start your day even a business without diving into one. From Instagram to Snapchat, Twitter to LinkedIn, and Facebook to Pinterest, each platform got its audience and value to favour different types of businesses or brands. No matter whether it’s a small or a huge brand, all of them are leveraging the power and impact of social media to reach out to their targeted audience. 

Even though with time and advancement in technology, social media offers many benefits to its users, it also brings with it, its fair share of disadvantages. But first, let’s take a look at some of the advantages of Social Media:

•  Easy, Affordable and Convenient 

It is very easy to use, affordable and convenient as well. In comparison to in-person advertisements and flyers, social media is clearly much cheaper and pocket friendly. 

•  Cost Effective for Branding Overseas 

For a company starting in India, whose target audience lives overseas, say for eg, the USA, using social media would be a great tool to market themselves. Offline branding and marketing in the USA can dig a hole in your pocket, especially if you are a small business. 

•  Freedom of Expression

Social Media also acts as a bridge between you and your customers. It gives both parties an equal opportunity and freedom to express their opinions and engage based on their preferences. For brands, it even helps analyse the performance and preferences of their audiences. 

•  Equal Growth Opportunities

With the help of social media marketing, even the smallest and newest of businesses can quickly reach a wider audience and carve a niche for themselves. Something that earlier would take years to build and cost huge amounts of money.

Let’s take an example of a few years back when Tiktok was quite a trend all over the world. It had spread like wildfire and had millions of users in no time. However, later in India, it got banned and lead to a lot of disappointment for people. But that gave Instagram an opportunity to create its own feature similar to TikTok which is the REELS and it got a lot of attention from all over the world. So we can see how competitive even these platforms are to be the best and reach as many people as they can. To establish your brand on social media, all you need to do is understand the nuances of the platform you are targeting and create quality and consistent content for your audience. 

Social media has completely changed the way firms run and has emerged as a vital tool for contemporary commerce. Businesses are embracing the power of social media to reach their target audience and spur growth in everything, whether it's customer engagement, marketing, lead generation or brand promotion.

Although, have you ever wondered why only some brands end up on the top pages of your search results and others do not? It is due to this reason, that some brands open their business with a strong social media marketing strategy and social media marketing team to create the required buzz amongst their audience and community, while others just launch themselves without one. Of course, it requires budget and resources to do so and every business or budding influencer might not have it. So while social media works as a boon for many brands, it also acts as a bane for those who do not understand how to make it work for them. Some brands even burn vast amounts of money running poorly-planned campaigns and targeting the wrong audience on social media.  

So that you or your brand doesn’t suffer through these losses, let’s take a look at the disadvantages of social media too.

•  Highly Unpredictable 

Along with its ease and convenience, social media also comes with huge amounts of unpredictability. You might never know which post, blog, or comment will not seem appealing to your audience. One day you could be on top of the brands, another day you could be trolled for some reason. That’s why you can never be sure about the results of social media, just try your best to optimise your content and give your best. 

•  Time-consuming

Social Media can be very time-consuming for consumers and creators both. Creating content itself consumes a major amount of time. Take the example of video content creators, it often includes a long process like shooting, editing and then posting. For textual content, it could be writing content, creating the graphics and then posting. In between, multiple revisions might also take place to portray exactly what you want. 

•  Doesn’t Support Breaks

As we mentioned earlier that social media channels come with great unpredictability, that’s why even after you have created quality content for a long time, but due to some reasons if you are not able to post as consistently as would earlier, then the algorithms might push you back and your engagement and visibility levels might drop. So either you have to prepare content in advance in order to take a break and have a team take care of it in your absence or suffer the engagement and visibility drop. 

•  Quick Shift in Interests 

In today’s fast-running world, the audience tends to quickly lose interest when they don’t see the content of their choice regularly. For instance, earlier you would post weekly for a month, then you started skipping a few weeks and then it became a monthly thing. In this case, the audience starts losing interest in your content and they might have other brands to fill the gap and attract their attention in the meantime. As a result, you might even lose your community.

•  Quality Resources Cost Money 

Even though social media is free, (apart from the paid analytical tools and now the paid verification service cost) but to create quality content you need experienced resources, which cost money. In the case of videos and reels, you need a proper set-up, studios, and even recording and editing equipment, which costs money. However, once you start making money out of it, it might not seem like a cost but rather an investment, however, initially, it definitely incurs a cost. 

Taking into account the aforementioned factors, we may conclude that like everything on earth, social media also has both pros and cons. Therefore, before starting social media marketing, it is important to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of social media. However, as we mentioned before, do not be taken down the initial cost of starting or even promoting your business on social media, rather if you can manage the consistency and match your audiences’ preferences then don’t worry about those initial costs. But rather overcoming those quickly by playing the social media game will put you ahead of the competition!

If you still have doubts regarding social media’s take on business you might wanna try out our consultants who have worked day and night with each of their clients to help them with their social media marketing.  So tap on the website link and leverage the business growth opportunities that social media can offer.