The advantages of devoting time to social media marketing definitely outweigh the disadvantages, but it is crucial to remember that businesses and entrepreneurs should strive to combine online and offline marketing to achieve balanced and high quality outcomes. Social media marketing alone is not going to acquire you as many clients or make your brand as visible as offline and online strategies combined.
From my experience, however, the main advantages of social media marketing are as follows:
- It provides you with extensive word of mouth advertising
- It has potential to ‘humanise’ your brand
- It results in engagement of wide audiences
- You can provide great customer service and demonstrate true consumer orientation of your brand
- It can significantly improve SEO (search engine optimisation) of your company
- You can conduct cost-effective market research online (polls, surveys etc)
With regard to disadvantages:
- It is very time consuming to put in place an effective integrated social media strategy
- Your efforts can fail if you over-promote, over-advertise
- It takes a lot of commitment and consistency
