If you have your own small business and are looking for ways to market it well, you might have already heard about the benefits a company can get from utilizing social media. There are different platforms that can help you promote your brand and reach out to your target audience. However, people are too focused on the positive aspect that they are missing the ‘not-so-good’ side.
Social media is a great tool, and it will always be beneficial to your business, but here are some of the hidden secrets that tend to get left out of the conversation.
Data won’t tell you everything.
One problem with social media is that although you are able to share masses of different content with people from all around the world – you’re not able to have a closer look at the data behind it all. You can’t see the different patterns of behavior, and how certain people reacted differently than others, because it’s social media, and that option isn’t available to us so we miss out on information that we could really benefit from knowing.
Social media marketing isn’t free.
This can really depend on how you look at it and how you plan on using it. In a sense yes, it is completely free in terms of money, but it is also extremely hard work. A lot of people assume it’s just taking a little video here and a little photo there, but the work that goes into everything is exhausting. So although it may not cost you cash, it costs you a lot of your valuable time and energy.
There’s no predictable pattern of success.
No matter how much work you put into making the best accounts and sharing the most amazing content, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to get thousands of followers. A lot of the time, unless you’re an incredible master of marketing, it ends up being down to luck. You may get a big break because someone super influential shared one of your photos for example, and in this case, you’ll have a short open window of opportunity to try and engage with as many people as you can.
You need a lot of followers before social media marketing pays off.
If you expect to get anywhere in the social media world, even just by making the slightest dent in order to better your business – you’re going to need an awful lot of followers. Let’s put it this way: you write a brilliant post that advertises your brand and business perfectly, and you share it to your 200 followers. Now imagine the exact same post, but going out to 200,000 followers instead – that’s when you are truly able to benefit from sales via social media.
So now you see, social media is, and always will be an incredible tool for businesses, but there are still many things that leave your future up to chance.
