Social media for businesses: The Pros & Cons

Social media is an ever growing platform that millions of us use on a daily basis. Whether it’s Facebook, YouTube or Twitter, social media allows us to connect with friends and family all over the world. Most social media channels are easy to use and allow us to share our life digitally, whether that be via photos, videos or content.

The majority of us use social media for our own personal use, but it’s a tool that businesses can utilise in many ways. With millions of users worldwide, it’s here that businesses can create a relevant audience and target them with appealing content and visuals that can hopefully raise brand awareness and drive relevant traffic to your site. Although social media has endless advantages, if used in the wrong way it can reflect badly on your business. For brands wanting to use social media as a way to connect with your audience, it’s best to seek advice from agencies like Click Consult who can give you expert advice on how to manage your channels.

With Facebook and Twitter being two of the most popular social platforms, we’ll take a look at the pros and cons they both carry.

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The Pros

The majority of social media platforms are easy to set up and use and can provide quick access to your following. Whether it’s on a desktop or mobile as long as you have access to the internet or data on your phone, you can use social media on the go meaning you communicate or share content within a matter of minutes.

Let’s first look at Twitter, with its recent update now allowing you to use a 280 character limit, it means that you can share relevant, intriguing content that gets the message across without being too heavily worded. One of the biggest advantages of Twitter is being able to search for relevant content and users through the use of hashtags. For any businesses using Twitter, it’s important to utilise relevant hashtags so you can build a relevant audience and attract users to your content.

With over 2 billion users worldwide, Facebook is constantly evolving and is becoming the go to social channel for larger businesses and SME’s. Facebook is really easy to use and allows you to engage with your audience both publicly and privately. Unlike Twitter, Facebook doesn’t have a character limit so you can share as much content as you like and it also allows you to share high quality imagery as well.

The Cons

As we’ve previously mentioned, social media can help your business take off but if done unprofessionally then it can reflect badly and potentially damage your brand image.

Although a maximum character usage may be good for some companies, it may not be for others. For anyone wanting to share a large amount of content then it will either have to be delivered in a thread of comments or a link will have to be added into the post which can take the user to an external webpage where the content is displayed. When it comes to your audience seeing what you’re sharing, this is where Twitter can have it disadvantages. With the amount of tweets that are made every minute, it’s easy for your content to get lost on your audience’s timeline, potentially reducing your risk of exposure.

When used by businesses Facebook has many advantages, especially if you just want to share images and content. If you want to run a marketing campaign through Facebook then you’ll find it can be very time consuming and difficult if you don’t have a dedicated social team. For personal use Facebook is good for privacy settings but this can sometimes be a downfall for businesses and in some areas it has really strict rules, for example if you want to run a competition.

Social media is a platform the can truly help your business grow. Through using your channels in the correct way, you can build an audience of users who are interested in what you do and hopefully build brand awareness as well as driving relevant traffic to your site.

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