Why Social Media Marketing Isn’t All It’s Cracked Up to Be
Is social media really free, as it’s always advertised to be? Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest and YouTube all enable business to set up profiles and pages and connect with their customers without paying anything for it. The big question is, if social media is free to use, is it really a free marketing strategy?
The Social Media Time Killer
Social media may not cost money, but it definitely costs time. And the deeper you plunge into it, the more time it will kill. And the more time it kills, the less time you will have for your business. Now this won’t be a problem if you hire people to handle this all for you but of course there is a cost to employing people or outsourcing to professional social media experts.
Small Business and Social Media
What happens when you’re running a small business? Can you, the owner, afford to spend one or more hours every day updating your social media profiles and interacting with your fans and followers?
That effort will be necessary to reap the benefits of social media. It’s not enough to create a static profile. The majority of marketers are using social media for 6 hours or more each week, according to Social Media Examiner. You too will have to invest solid hours into social media every week. You need to create content, you need to like and share others’ content, you need to ask questions and give answers, you need to become an active member of the global social media community.
The fact is this: if you cannot afford to maintain your social media marketing then you shouldn’t bother investing too much time and effort into it from the start.
There is one other problem with social media as a marketing tool. Measuring its return on investment is a challenge. According to Adobe, 52% of marketers have difficulties in measuring ROI and cite this as their biggest source of frustration in social marketing.
In conclusion, social media marketing is rewarding only with those who invest time in it. It does have huge potential for the right kind of business, but also demand something many of us lack – time.
