Opportunities and Challenges in Using Social Media for Your Business Promotion

The ever-evolving social media platforms open up great opportunities for marketers on a day-to-day basis. Social media is increasingly becoming a hub to expand reach and to create wonderful user-experiences. The reach of social media is high because it is a personalized medium. Since, no business can grow in isolation, social media marketing opens up opportunities to reach your target audiences and win their minds. To help you use social media in an optimal way, to your advantage, we bring to you 3 opportunities and the challenges that come with them.

1. Fresh social advertising avenues: The digital space is flooded with news of new advertising opportunities and avenues on social platforms that you can use to your benefit.

Recently, Facebook’s and Instagram’s carousel advertisements to buy buttons and partner integrations such as Square and Twitter, all came together to promote political donations. The explosion of these new avenues offer innovative and exciting ways to promote your business using social media. The challenge tied with this opportunity is that there are so many new developments taking place that marketers find it difficult to keep a track of what’s news and how it can benefit their business. It is essential as a marketer that you closely keep an eye on these new developments, down to the minutest details and figure out how it can benefit your business. It is always a good thing to know how you can innovatively and effectively use a particular advertising avenue without sullying the platform it is available on.

2. Just-out social networking platforms: The usage of mobile and mobile messaging is growing with every passing moment, also giving rise to mobile messaging applications - a great avenue for marketers to reach their audiences and engage with them. However, there is a challenge in determining the right application to reach and engage your consumers. Marketers will have to rely on data, their marketing goals, social media plan and their own sensibility and judgement to determine the right messaging app. Some marketers might also decide to postpone the use of messaging platforms because of lack of resources or business priorities, or due to immaturity of the messaging platform and its analytics.

3. Innovative video formats: Videos are increasingly becoming an important form of content for most brands, which leads to cutting edge competition to gain video-views within the social media platforms. Marketers don’t hesitate in investing to get increased visibility of their videos in the feeds, since it offers low cost per engagement as compared to other forms of content posted and boosted on social channels. The obvious challenge which goes hand in hand with this opportunity is - to efficiently generate effective video content, which will definitely increase the social media budget. Further, the live streaming capabilities offered by various platforms that work on a 360 degree video application approach would require social media marketers to focus on integrated campaigns across platforms to make more out of media partnerships, celebrity endorsements and events that can be reproduced as video content.

Marketers need to bank upon these opportunities with enthusiasm and a realistic approach to overcome the challenges these opportunities bring in their fold. As you look forward to plan and strategize to promote your business on social media, keep these points in mind to avoid any glitches while executing the plan. While as a marketer you might be able to resolve these challenges on your own, it is recommended that you hire an agency which specializes in social media marketing, for better results.