It’s hard to stay away from social media sites. Almost everyone is using them to promote their business or for personal use. From a business stand point; there are advantages and disadvantages of using social media for your business.
Advantages
1. It’s free! Setting up an account is easy peasy and you’ll be up and ready to go in a several minutes. When using social media sites to promote your business, it has the potential to go viral.
2. It drives traffic to your site from your target market and beyond.
3. It helps build credibility, exposure and transparency because it shows you as a real person.
4. It builds relationships and brings people together through similar interests, ideas, thoughts and conversations.
5. It helps with your online branding.
6. It’s an easy way to share and educate others about your products, services and industry.
7. It’s a good way to build a community with local people.
8. It’s another way to provide customer support and get customer feedback.
Disadvantages
1. Social media is time consuming so it’s easy to spend a lot of time doing non-business socializing. It’s easy to be involved in more than two social networking sites and spreading yourself thin will do more damage than good.
2. To be effective, you have to be consistent with your presence. You can’t promote your business now and then. You need to interact and continue to build relationships.
3. How well you handle yourself in negative light and not owning up to your mistakes and correcting them can ruin your reputation. Word of mouth negativity travels quickly in social media outlets.
4. Anyone can be someone they are not. It’s not difficult to come up with a fake identity and scam people.
There are more advantages than disadvantages of using social media for your business. Before you start using social media have a plan and strategy on how you will use it to your benefit.
