Understanding the Cons of Social Media

For all its upsides, social media has its downsides. As social media has
gained in popularity, it has also become increasingly difficult to gain visibility
among its hundreds of millions of users.
In fact, sometimes you have to craft a campaign just to build an audience
on a particular social media site. It’s quite similar to conducting optimization
and inbound link campaigns so that your site is found in natural search
results.

Saving money on advertising

The magic word is free. If you’re a start-up company, “free” social media is
likely the only advertising you can afford. If you decide to approach social
media for this purpose, construct your master campaign just as carefully as
you would a paid one:

✦ Create a plan that outlines target markets, ad offers, publishing venues,
and scheduled “flights” for different ad campaigns.

Selling when opportunity arises

Conventional thinking says that social media is designed for long-term
engagement, for marketing and branding rather than for sales. However,
a few obvious selling opportunities exist, particularly for business-toconsumer
(B2C) companies, that won’t offend followers:

✦ Sell CDs and event tickets. Services such as MySpace cater to music
and entertainment and are considered appropriate places.
✦ Include a link to your store on social shopping services. Recommend
products — particularly apparel, jewelry, beauty, and decor — as
Stylehive does.
✦ Offer promotional codes or special offers to followers. Offering them
on particular networks encourages your followers to visit your site to
make a purchase. You can even announce sales or events.