Social Media Marketing is a new tool to gain popularity and spread awareness about a product or service. It’s the easiest way to cut down complexities and pave the path for the instantaneous discovery of your product or service in all communities. It’s true that social media has become an essential part of everyone’s lives.
Students to job seekers and entrepreneurs, everybody makes use of online social media networks for their respective purposes. Our lives have become incalculably easier with the emergence of online social networking sites.
Though, it’s really helpful for emerging businesses and startups to count on social media marketing. However, it’s also a hard nut to crack for enterprises, especially newer ones to get credibility in the eyes of customers and prospects. Here, it is social media that takes your trustworthiness to the next level. Also, it depends upon a business’s marketing strategy of how well it socializes itself and stands out as a trustable one in the herd of established businesses and corporations.
This post illustrates the challenges and constraints of social media marketing in 2018 with practical examples. Rest assured. With a little effort, persistence, and smart planning, it’ll be as easy as A-B-C to overcome challenges and free yourself from the constraints quite simply. Bear in mind; Social media is a steep learning curve for content strategists, social media experts, and digital marketers. Besides social media marketing strategies, you can also adopt other digital marketing strategies, such as hiring a press release distribution service.
The more you will work strategically with the presence of mind, the better results you will get from the input and vice versa.
Table of Contents
1. Preserving Brand Reputation:
Thousands of competitor brands are emerging daily to give you a tough time expressing your message to a wider audience. Frequent changes in algorithms of online social networking sites lead to disarray. In reality, maintaining a brand reputation has become a nail-biting challenge.
It’s not in the hands of the junior-level social media executive or Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) of a company to maintain the reputation of the brand; it is the responsibility of everybody inside the company to take the reputation of the brand as his/her own.
Handling a brand reputation is one of the biggest constraints which every company has to put up with. This constraint can be destroyed easily with the preparation of well-written guidelines. Social media marketing should work with well-defined, meaningful, certain, and purposeful guidelines to bar the chances of getting bogged down in anonymity and adrift. Apart from guidelines, a thing that should be taken into consideration seriously is a social calendar. Prepare a social calendar now and achieve your targets.
2. Consistency and Storytelling
The charm and feel-good side of social media as a platform to broadcast ideas and share information are totally undeniable. Most companies forget to storify the problems of the customers and spend most of the time promoting themselves. That’s why, while making a brand strategy, ensure that your content is relevant, audience-focused, and valuable.
Better create the content which is prepared with the client’s demands in mind. It should highlight the values and personality of the brand and must be encouraging conversation. Writing Voice and tone matter most as well in this regard, a surefire way to keep the audience engaged is to provide unique information.
Netflix is a great example here. This brand is ultra-successful on social media. Being a super-successful media services provider, it capitalizes on social media channels to converse with customers and audiences.
If your brand is underperforming for any reason, it can start doing better with just a few tweaks. For instance, make good use of hashtags to jump-start conversation and build rapport with the audience.
3. Confusion Between Local and Global Strategy:
As stated earlier in this post, managing social media channels demands careful and heedful planning.
It’s a problematic thing for companies to decide which strategy should be chosen whether it should be global or local. But, keep one thing away from your mind, if you want your social media campaign to yield more results; never count on the ‘One-Size-Fits-All’ approach.
Maybe, one company is benefitting hugely from a global strategy with guaranteed consistency across all channels. On the other hand, the local strategy could be to cater to the audience of a local culture that could enable you to outweigh the competitors.
Take an example of Starbucks here. It manages regional channels on social media platforms to facilitate the local audience and fulfill the message of the brand by providing the best content and services.
4. Failing at Resolving Customers’ Issues:
In spite of having well-conceived brand guidelines, it’s not assured that the audience won’t get offended; though, that was unintentional.
Here, it’s the responsibility of social media strategists to construct the best response possible to weed out online hatred, agony, and despair. Never take social media websites as customer care platforms; they should be used just for the sake of interacting with clients.
If you will reply to one tweet of the customer you will have to reply to ten more of the same customer and it will end at the loss of credibility.
An example of a brand that dealt with a similar situation convincingly is GBK. Once, the ad campaign with slogans i.e. ‘they eat grass so you don’t have to, causes a stern reaction by vegetarian Twitter users. Instead of giving an instant reaction, the brand took time in resolving issues and offered an appropriate and considerable response.
Conclusion:
Preserving brand reputation, lack of consistency and storytelling, confusion between local and strategy, and failing at resolving customers’ issues are the 4 main challenges and constraints of social media marketing in 2018. However, with the correct application of the tips given here with examples, you will be able to protect your social media campaign from failing and going wasted.
