Pros and Cons of Social Media Marketing vs. Online Marketing


We compare social media marketing and online marketing. For the purposes of this article, social media means posting on websites such as Facebook and Instagram, be it from a personal account or a business page, interacting with customers and either directing them to a standalone website or an e-commerce platform such as Amazon or selling to them directly on social media.

Online marketing means a variety of other forms of marketing on the Internet, including pay-per-click, search engine optimization, and affiliate sales.

Social media

Pros

Free and easy to get started – Social media websites such as Facebook are free for users because Facebook charges advertisers for showing ads to Facebook users. Users get content and advertising and because there is advertising, the platform is free to use, but Facebook is still making money.

Obviously, Facebook is interested to have as many users as possible because the more users it has, the more advertisers would be interested in buying ads. This is the reason why Facebook is very user-friendly and easy to get started. You can literally create a new account from scratch within minutes.

Relatively simple and straightforward – Not only is Facebook free to use, it is also very simple to use. You can add friends, join groups, create pages and post photos, videos, and links. If you think that you have amazing content that people will start sharing once they consume it, Facebook and other social media websites are a great way to test how good your content is because they are free and quick to get started.

Instant posting and reach – Once you post on Facebook, your post immediately becomes visible to your followers. While Facebook does experiment a lot with its algorithms and sorting the things that go into user feeds if your content is really popular and users like it, it will be appearing in the feeds. Also, Facebook will always show your content if someone is coming to your page.

Cons

Free and easy to get started – Free and easy to get started was the first advantage of social media and it is also the first disadvantage. It is a disadvantage because free and easy to get started means that the barrier to entry is low. In turn, the low barrier to entry means that literally anyone can create a page and be on Facebook and other popular social media websites in seconds. As a consequence, the platform has a lot of content, some of it is high quality and some of it is low quality. For this reason, standing out may be a challenge even if and when your content is great. Another problem with free is that generally speaking, people tend to not value much what they get for free. The feedback you get from people when you are engaging in conversations without selling would also be very different from the feedback from those who actually have paid you money.

Need to create content and engage customers frequently – Because the competition is high and people on social media get distracted easily, you will most likely need to post very often for a period of time so that your followers would notice your presence. Creating one post that will immediately become viral and make you a lot of money is highly unlikely.

Short-term exposure – One of the reasons why you will need to be creating content on a regular basis is that content on social media gets very short-term exposure. It is true that it stays on the network forever, but it simply gets pushed down by new content. If someone visits your page and starts scrolling down, they will see your new content on top and old content below, but the issue is that it is not what most people do. Most people would check the newest and the latest posts, quickly get bored and switch to doing something else.

Strict rules – As platforms such as Facebook mature, they implement stricter and stricter rules not just for advertisers, but also for posters. This means that today Facebook may be thinking that your posts are fine and tomorrow it implements a new policy, according to which your posts are no longer fine.

 

Online marketing

Pros

Attract prospects that are looking for what you have to offer – One of the biggest advantages of paid online marketing methods such as pay-per-click is that with pay-per-click you get customers that are looking for what you have. Typically, people do not come to a social media website such as Facebook because they want to buy something. They come because they want to see and comment on the pictures of their friends because they want to get the latest news and check what their favorite celebrities have been up to. In essence, this means that on social media you will often be an unwelcome guest. When you know your demographic and are offering something of value, you will make money on social media, but it is still very different from selling item X to someone who types “buy item X near me” into Google because you know that when someone enters a keyword like this, the person is ready to buy.

Almost instant results with online marketing methods such as pay-per-click – Not only do you get prospects ready and willing to buy, but you can also do so very quickly. With pay-per-click, you need to create a campaign and once its approved, which takes from a few hours to a few days, people will start seeing your ads and you will start getting clicks.

Transparent volume – Another benefit of online marketing is that with most platforms you can get very accurate estimates about search volume, trends, and more. This data is also available on social media, but a group on social media can have a lot of inactive or fake users meaning that data about them is not going to be reliable. Faking volume with search engines is much harder, if not impossible.

Cons

Expensive – The biggest disadvantage of many online marketing methods is that these methods have become quite expensive in the recent years. Gone are the times when you could be getting clicks for pennies. Today, most big corporations advertise using keywords that contain the names of the corporations. A corporation would be paying for clicks even when it is number one in organic search because for many businesses certainty and a higher probability of getting a click are more important than saving money.

Some forms of online marketing take a lot of work – While pay-per-click is almost instant, methods such search engine optimization may require months of work and link-building before your website shows where you want in search results.

May be hard to figure out why things work and why they don’t – While most online marketing solutions today come with analytics tools, the tools will show you what works and what doesn’t, but you will not know why. For example, you may be getting more clicks for one of your ads, but you will not know why because people that saw the ad most likely didn’t see your other ads and so direct comparison becomes impossible. You can compare the ads by showing them to different target segments and you will get the results, but to figure out why the results are what they are you will need to make assumptions and then test your assumptions, which is very different from knowing why things work and why they don’t.