After reading all about the advantages of social media marketing you have probably made the decision to incorporate social media marketing into your marketing strategy. However because you are a smart marketer, you want to go in with your eyes open to the disadvantages of using social media for your business. As a digital marketing agency specialising in social media marketing our natural inclination would be to sell the idea, unfortunately nothing is ever all good and we would be remiss if we did not share some of the pitfalls you might find yourself in while utilising social media as part of your business strategy.

Social Media Marketing is Resource Intensive

In the course of our work we have often met clients feeling overwhelmed by the amount of work that social media marketing represents. Most go in thinking it will be similar to running their own personal accounts and experience a rude awakening when this is not so. In fact a business page on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn requires more work; graphic design of branded posts, copywriting and content creation not to mention a comprehensive strategy that aligns with your overall marketing objectives. All this requires a lot of time which most marketing personnel can ill afford among chasing sales and traditional offline marketing efforts. In addition to being time intensive, social media marketing requires qualified personnel. Another trend we have seen in Zimbabwean corporates is the use of interns or students. While this is a byproduct of the school of thought that believes the young are better at technology, we must point out that this will cost you more in the long run. This will be made clearer as we proceed.

Social Media Marketing Is A Long Term Investment

Creating your social media platform pages and instantly expecting to reap the benefits overnight will leave you sore with disappointment. As explained in the point above, a lot of time and intellectual resources must be inputted, constantly before you can start seeing traction on your page.

Ineffective Use

A very unfortunate pitfall of social media marketing is ineffective use and this what we see in most cases. It is easy to believe that establishing a presence on all social media platforms and posting frequently, you have aced everything. It is when the benefits don’t start rolling in that you wonder what could be wrong. Social media marketing has best practices that must be conformed to if you are to reap any befits at all. Aggressive selling will win you no fans, and neither will not engaging with your clients or making the effort to create outstanding content that resonates with your audience. This is what we term ineffective use, going through the wrong  motions.

Mistakes Will Cost You Dearly

Once you publish a post, comment or reply it’s out there for the world to see and with the prevalent screen shot culture one can’t ever rely on deleting these mistakes. This is one of the reasons why you should be wary of hiring inexperienced students to run your social media pages. A careless reference to religion, politics or sex can catapult you into a fully-fledged PR disaster.

Social media also makes it very easy for customers to express their dissatisfaction and disappointment with your products and services.

An Ever Changing Landscape

You have probably heard of the word algorithm and how often Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn and other social media platforms are often changing, improving and refining on them. These algorithms affect how your posts are shown to audiences and your social media strategy should always include ways to work around, conform or take advantage of them. This is why you will need a qualified person or outside agency to help you keep up to date.

We have seen platforms such as MySpace come and go and this depicts further why social media landscape is ever changing. It’s important to keep abreast of the platforms where your audience is and whether that platform gives value to your business.

Despite the advantages outlined above, brands have had value that far outweighs all these cons. Better still you can mitigate the negatives by partnering with a digital agency like ourselves to help you with a social media strategy, content creation, graphic design as well as online reputation management and monitoring that is well integrated with your traditional marketing efforts.

We invite you to think and move differently.

Let’s “Reset” those pages and have them working efficiently.

Give us a call today!