A social media strategy can have its fair share of pros and cons. Depending on your familiarity with the medium, developing your social networking tools may require a significant amount of trial and error—but the positives still outweigh the negatives.

The Pros of Social Media Marketing

• There is great opportunity to gain mass exposure by letting your customers do the hard work of promoting your company for you. Doing so allows you to reach a far wider audience than traditional channels.
• By paying attention to the public feedback you receive from your customers, you have the opportunity to improve the services you’re offering in a way that might otherwise take months of information gathering through more expensive traditional methods.
• Social networking is cheap. There is no cost to create a Facebook profile, Twitter account, or YouTube channel.

The Cons of Social Media Marketing

• Social marketing isn’t for every company. If you have a large percentage of dissatisfied customers, they will take the opportunity to broadcast their laundry list of complaints throughout all of the top social networks. But if you’re having this much trouble keeping your customers satisfied, shying away from social media advertising is not the answer. Perhaps it’s time to take a closer look at the level of service you’re providing your customers.
• Social marketing requires time and effort. If you’re not up to the task of staying on top of everything—including posting frequent blogs, Twitter posts, and responding to comments and inquiries by your customers—perhaps you should consider hiring a third party company to handle your presence on the top social networks.
• Your efforts won’t yield immediate results, and for that reason they may be hard to quantify. When embarking upon a social media strategy, it’s important to view your success rates in the long term.