Social media has become the biggest online community platform in the world. According to a recent report, almost 77 percent of the entire U.S. population has a social media account. The vastness of social media platforms has opened up huge business opportunities for many companies and business owners. However, as wonderful as it might seem, you should not only stick to social media for marketing and sales purposes.

To understand this, let’s look at some advantages and disadvantages of the social media platform:

• Reduced Marketing Costs: Promote your page or channel on the social media platform by uploading interesting content; people will start following you. After gathering a big following, you can simply market all your products and services for free. For more effective marketing campaigns on social media, you will be required to avail the premium promotion services, which are incredibly cheap.
• Increased Traffic on Your Website: You can divert a lot of traffic from social media to your website by posting links.
• Good Customer Engagement: You can directly engage with the customers and take their feedback on your products and services for improvements.
• Access to International Market: Social media is a vast network spread across the world. It is a great place to search for international markets.
• Improved Relations with Other Businesses: Social media also provides great opportunities for B2B sales.

Disadvantages

• No Room for Errors: Unlike SEO, social media does not forgive and forget. A foolish mistake can easily go viral and literally destroy your brand.
• Hiring A Permanent Representative: Social media is pretty fast-paced, and it requires constant updating. To remain active on social media, you will be required to hire a full-time representative to work on it constantly.
• Risk of Unwanted or Inappropriate Behavior on Your Site: Social media has all kinds of people from around the world. Therefore, there is always a risk of running into some bad people.
• Risk of Exposure to Wrong Sources: There is always a chance that you will receive negative feedback from some customers that may tarnish your brand. Other risks include leaking of confidential information through hacking.

Conclusion

As you can see above, social media has a lot of advantages when it comes to business promotion. However, it also has some disadvantages as well. This is why it might not be a good idea to only stick to social media platforms when it comes to business marketing. It may work very well for you or it may destroy your business; it is truly a gamble.

The best way to promote your business is by using all the available options smartly. Utilize all the benefits of social media while you also work on other ways such as SEO (Search Engine Optimization). In this way, you are more likely to succeed.