10 Disadvantages Of Social Media Marketing & What To Do?

Disadvantages of social media marketing for business, Really? I bet you must be curious how is this possible right? Continue reading and you will realize the truth.

In 2019, social media are not only used for chit-chatting with friends, liking photos and videos or even following each other anymore.

People have used them as a tool to promote business or create awareness about their brands. This is known as social media marketing.

However, many businesses have fallen into what I call a SOCIAL BUSINESS LOOP, especially new businesses.

Social business loop means businesses, without much authority or awareness, heavily rely on social media to promote business and end up generating little to no leads by attracting non targeted audiences. – #1 disadvantages of social media marketing for business

Without much further ado, let’s dive into the topic.

10 Disadvantages Of Social Media Marketing

1. Not Built For Businesses

This is the main disadvantage of social media marketing for business. As mentioned earlier in the article, many businesses, especially the new ones, which do not have enough awareness or reputation are extremely not advised to focus on social media marketing.

Even if the well-reputed business does not invest much in social media marketing in general.

This is all mainly because what the core purpose of what social media is. In my opinion, social media are built for connecting two or more people in a “relaxed fashion”.

Relaxed fashion here means, for example, chatting with friends, liking photos, following people, watching funny videos, etc, just what you do with social media in day to day life.

True, social media like Facebook or Instagram are now supporting business promotion but you cannot forget what the core purpose they are built for and that people’s preferences and choices will still remain the same.

For example, if you want to buy certain products online, what is the first thing that comes to your mind? – either Google or e-commerce platform like Amazon right? Now I think you start to understand it now.

There’s simply no ‘buying-intent’ when people use social media.

2. Negative Feedback And Tarnish Brand Name

Being on social media means exposing yourself publicly to all kinds of people who may or may not have the intention of coming across or seeing your brand.

You and I both know there is always a dark side to everything, and social media is no exception.

With the internet being easily accessible more than ever before, there are people who always aim to damage one’s reputation.

If your business is unknown or just starting to gain momentum, the chances are of getting an attack are more likely.

Because it’s so easy to comment or engage, anyone can easily write negative comments on your business

Bad things can spread out through social media and you know how quickly things are.

3. Heavily Rely On Ads

Ads, Ads, Ads everywhere! I know you are frustrated at ads, me too. In today’s online marketing, ads dominate.

Social media companies are very aware of that too. Facebook ads announcement was a revolution.

With its ability to target specific audiences based on various parameters in-depth, it’s what makes it such a powerful tool to generate leads online. (Disadvantage for small business)

Advertisement is the main channel for these giants to make money on their platform. That’s why they really focus on promoting and luring people to use their ads platform.

As far as I have seen, Facebook’s organic reach is almost dead in 2019. Instagram, well you could get some reach through hashtags but you will most likely get those people who sell some likes or followers to follow you.

This is one of the biggest disadvantages of social media for your business.

Unless you pump in loads of money, which is not recommended if your business is still new or trying the market.

4. Low ROI

Another main negative of social media for business. ROI from social media marketing is probably one of the lowest in online marketing strategies. You have to put both time, effort and money to really make things work.

If you are a social media geek, you should know this very well. If you do not post or engage with your fans or people on a regular basis, what you notice is your followers will start decreasing.

In social networks, only the die-hard fans stay. And if your brand or business is not well aware of a particular group of people or locations, no one is really going to be your true die-hard fans, trust me.

So it’s really time-consuming to actually create that kind of audience unless you are well known.

That is why what you should be doing before starting social media marketing is to establish a certain reputation and awareness about your brand and business.

This way, you do not have to chase around people or increase followers by going and mass following people.

5. Time-Consuming

One big misconception people have about social media is that: It’s FREE.

There are several free or low-cost social media tools available, but you have to deploy a substantial amount of time to understand and learn the usage.

Time is not absolutely free.

Companies who have implemented social media activities on their marketing strategies successfully understand how much time it takes to learn and implement all of them.

6. Need To Stay Engaged And Active

Speaking about time-consuming, with social media marketing, you need to always stay engage, monitor and active your marketing effort.

Social media is constantly changing and if you’re not up-to-date, you’re going to fall behind the others.

Any qualified personnel knows that to succeed in any social media marketing strategy, you need to spend both time and money in order to get the most out of it.

For example, have you ever wondered why you lose Instagram followers when you don’t post after a week or two? That’s the reason.

People on social media are always looking for new and fresh things. As a marketer, that’s your job to provide them.

7. Difficult To Measure

Measuring your marketing effort on social media is just more difficult and complicated than it sounds.

This particular con of social media marketing is what many business owners will have to face.

At one point, you’ve got likes, comments, retweets and followers all over the place, at another point, you simply can’t pinpoint exactly whether these aspects really matter for your effort.

The engagement and interactions are just all over the place and with this, you can’t definitely be sure about your brand awareness strategies.

8. Security And Privacy Policy Issues

One of the biggest negatives of social media marketing is the security and privacy-related issues.

When you’re using social media platforms for advertising, you basically need to surrender your information, both public and personal, in order to get the most out of your marketing effort.

With social media platforms being a constant target for hackers or unethical people, your information and data will never be safe.

Take a look at the latest Facebook data breach news, millions and millions of data have been leaked and with this, you’re risking your business in the hands of unreliable platforms.

True, social platforms are constantly improving on this, but they will never be 100% safe.

9. Limited Only To Social Media Platforms

When you do social media marketing, you’re essentially using social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram or Twitter to market and build brand awareness.

But this is only limited to social media. Unlike other marketing channels like SEO or SEM, where you can expand your marketing effort to various places, thus being more flexible, social media marketing only stays on social media.

Another disadvantage here is that different platforms require different strategies. This basically a wastage of time effort and money.

10. Doesn’t Work For All Group Of People

You cannot target all people groups with your social media marketing efforts.

This is because a different group of people uses social media differently. In fact, some groups may not even be present on social media.

This is the reason why for any online marketing strategies, you need to do research for your target audiences.

Even that, a different group of people are active on different platforms. For instance, Instagram is more famous among female teens whereas Facebook is used more by elderly people.

What You Should Do Instead?

So now you have understood four major negatives of social marketing for businesses.

To get things right for your business, or in other words, to build a correct foundation of your business really boils down to one thing – To create a well-established reputation and awareness about it.

Now there are 3 major ways that you can do that:

1. Leverage your organic traffic through search engines
2. Promote your business using videos ( primarily through YouTube)
3. Get featured on a podcast

We consume information online in 3 ways i.e through text, visuals, and audios. Text, for example, a blog. Visuals are through images and videos, and audio is through videos and podcasts in general.

So before you start out leveraging the above 3 major ways, what you first need is a website. You can compare the website as your central point, through which you pull traffic from various sources.

To implement the first way

i.e organic traffic through search engines, you need to do SEO. Sure It takes time and effort but the results paid off are generally of multiple folds. Nothing is as powerful as organic search engines’ traffic.

This is the traffic which users have intents in getting something. So you can be sure that they will likely convert. If you are a local business owner, you can check out my local SEO tips.

To implement the second way

To leverage your business using video is very essential. According to the stats, by 2020, 75% of the mobile traffic will be video.

You can easily do this using YouTube. Being the second largest search engine in the world, YouTube is probably the best place to host free videos in order to promote your brand.

Millions of people come to YouTube daily to watch informative videos. Make sure your videos are helpful and engaging.

The good part about this is, you can also monetize your channel too. So it’s a double win situation. And in each video, you can link back to your website as a referral source of traffic.

Lastly, podcast

Get your business featured on any local or famous podcast to leverage authority.

These podcast websites not only help you promote your business but also they link out to your site as well. This way, you get the SEO advantage as well as traffic as a referral.

The above processes take time but they are really worth it. Once you have created enough awareness and reputation, then it’s time to hop to social media marketing.

By now, people must have started knowing about your business and its reputation. Generating audiences from this point is pretty easy and the cool part is, you do not have to chase around for your audiences. They will come to you.

Recap

Here are 10 disadvantages of social media marketing:

1. Not built for business
2. Negative feedback and tarnish brand
3. Heavily rely on ads
4. Low ROI
5. Time-consuming
6. Need to stay engaged and active
7. Difficult to measure
8. Security and privacy policy issues
9. Limited to social media platforms
10. Doesn’t work for all group of people

Conclusion

That’s all for the disadvantages of social media marketing for business.

The points highlighted above are simply not meant to discourage you from doing social media marketing.

Sure there are advantages to social media marketing as well. But this article is simply to help you realize what you should be aware of before jumping into it.

The key point to take away from this article is, no businesses in this world become successful through only social media marketing or I can guarantee you, I don’t think any successful businesses heavily focus on social media marketing as well.

What you should be focusing on first and foremost before starting it is to build awareness and reputation.

In my opinion, social media is a tool that is used as a follow up to any brand, people or organizations.

And the advice (From above point) which I gave to the person who sells shoes on the Instagram store is to get a website.

Like I explained to you, make the website as a central point of your business. Focus on it and the rest is optional.

That’s all for the articles. I would like to know whether you are that type of person who jumped directly into social media marketing without having established a well-known reputation

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