Social Media Marketing (SMM) is a part of Digital Marketing and e-marketing that uses social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, Youtube, etc to promote, advertise, build companies brand, and increase sales and website traffic.

In the 21st century, Social media have transformed the marketing and advertisement industry. Social Media’s advantage of having millions of users means that they can help you segment demographics! You can segment the customer by age, gender, location, educational background, etc. Social Media advertisements will reach the segmented audience which boosts your conversion rates.

60% of world’s population uses social media. The average daily usage is 2 hours and 29 minutes.

• 4.70 billion people around the world now use social media, and 230 million new users have come online within the last 12 months.
• More than half of the world’s population uses social media (60%)
• The average daily usage on Social Media platforms worldwide is 2 hours and 30 minutes.
• Yearly the growth in social media users is 5.1%.
• The average number of social media platforms used each month is 7.4

As users on Social Media platforms are increasing day by day, marketers are perfecting strategies to capture the potential customers for their products or services and the significant competitive advantage that engagement with this key audience can deliver even more rapidly and more effectively than traditional marketing.

The potential of Social Media Marketing showcasing comes from the unmatched limit of Social Media in three core marketing area: connection, interaction, and customer data.

Social Media Marketing has changed how organizations can impact consumer behavior — from advancing substance that drives commitment to extricating individual information that causes informing to reverberate with clients.

Since Social Media today is so pervasive, Marketing techniques utilizing these stages are extremely important for businesses.

Analysis of regional use of social media shows the wide variation of social media penetration in 2022:

• 71% in Eastern Asia
• 72% in South Eastern Asia
• 78% in North America
• 78% in South America
• 84 and 83 in Northern and Western Europe respectively.
• This falls to 45% in Southern Asia, 16% in Western Africa, and 9% in Middle Africa. However, Some of these countries may see more social media usage in 2022, which would increase the global total.

Merits and Demerits of Social Media Marketing (SMM)

Merits of Social Media Marketing (SMM)

1. Increase brand awareness– Promoting your brand using social media platforms is a powerful way to expand your brand awareness and increase Click- Through Rates. Aside from Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, you can use other platforms like TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat, Youtube, And LinkedIn.
2. Promotes customer engagement– Engagement with customers is a fundamental factor in marketing that boost conversion rate. Businesses and Social Media Marketing experts have been promoting their respective brands for many years to drive customer engagement.
3. Assists in monitoring competitors- Using Social Media Marketing tools like Facebook Ads, you can research the competitor’s latest activities and trends. You can monitor that and you will get to know how best to market your product and services. These activities may include business strategies or marketing efforts you can adapt and with some modifications, you can apply to your marketing campaign according to your business.
4. Provides accessible consumer insights– In today’s time, most social media users are vocal about their likes and dislikes on the social media platform. the platform can help Social Media Advertising Expert can identify their consumer needs and wants using the insights. Therefore, the best you can do is to gather data from different social media platforms and advertise your product or service accordingly which is the solution to their problems.
5. Economical– Creating an account on Social Media Platforms are free- you just need to sign up with an email address. With a social media platform, you can promote or advertise your product or services by posting online. The ads could be in form of videos, images, etc. you can add new clients and retain your existing clients. You can launch your new product on these social media with less expense. Creating a business profile may require little investment but it is not going to burn your pocket.

Demerits of Social Media Marketing (SMM)

1. Allow negative feedback– Social Media have a very high reach, one negative feedback from an intimidated customer or client can go viral and can hit your business and reputation harder than a knockout punch. So, if a customer notices negative feedback online about your business, they could lose trust in your brand. It can work as negative word of mouth because seeing negative feedback other customers will also start posting their negative feedback.
2. Costly and tedious– Social Media advertising is a continuous process of popularizing a brand or brand and needs good content which looks easy on paper, but in reality, you require a lot of patience and time for Social media management. On average it takes nearly a year to get noticed on social media by customers. However, you can pace up your advertising campaign by giving them a boost, at a price. You need to pay different social media apps to run your campaign, the cost differs from platform to platform.
3. Presents a high volume of content– As 60% of the world population, today has access to the internet which includes all social media platforms. Hence, more businesses are going online for brand awareness and to advertise their product and services. But there is a lot of content from different businesses are available on all the platforms that utilize social media in their marketing ads and campaign. So finding a potential customer for your brand is really hard these days on social media. It is like finding a needle in a haystack.
4. Susceptible to misleading information– Social media possess a high volume of content which will also lead to misleading or fake information. We have seen in the past that there are many misleading information available on these social media platforms which has impacted many big brands. Unfortunately, if there is any misleading information got viral, other people even believe those posts immediately without proper crosschecking for authenticity. Thus misleading information could deteriorate your business reputation on a large scale.
5. Risk of possible security breaches– With the rising digitalization in this 21st century, there is a high risk of hacking and malicious viruses. So, consider them while creating your social media marketing plans. Data is a highly valuable leaking that will cost you a heavy amount like customer trust, your brand value, etc.

Social Media Advertising depends on the risk-taking capacity. In business, remaining inside one’s usual range of familiarity doesn’t take you anywhere. Besides, there are all purchases are final without a healthy amount of risks!