Benefits and limitations of social media platforms

Benefits and limitations of social media platforms

Written by Kevin Spiteri on . Posted in #Business, Social Media

BENEFITS AND LIMITATIONS OF SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS

With most people relying on the internet to find local businesses nowadays, business has the power to reach millions of potential customers. Businesses are starting to realize that they need to start activating multiple platforms to reach their target audience and stay competitive.

To establish an online presence, using one or two platforms is what I typically recommend for small business owners. For growing businesses that wants to activate different target audiences, business or channels, I’d recommend using social media management tools to manage different social media platforms for different businesses.

Prior establishing your presence online and reaching customers worldwide, we’ve listed the benefits and limitations of social media management tools to help you make an informed decision.

Benefits

  • It allows you to consolidate the management of one business into one place as opposed to having to go to the individual channels. For instance, there are many reasons why a company would have multiple social pages and imagine how hard it would be when you have to login and logout of each individual profile and network to check all the messages. Having been able to manage all accounts and profiles in one spot saves you the time and effort needed to constantly juggle accounts
  • It typically also offers services that you can’t see in another channel offers. As an example, Facebook, LinkedIn and other channels allows scheduling while Instagram doesn’t. Instagram still requires an approval from a phone to post.

Limitations

  • Using social media management platforms has its drawbacks as well. Like Hootsuite, it’s also being known to cause effectively penalties by the algorithm of the social media platform that it’s being posted to. So, there’s has been times where we’ve seen the reach of the post that’s came from a social media management tool being posted on Facebook has not received the same amount of reach as opposed to the post that’s been placed organically on Facebook. Another instance would be posts sent via Facebook scheduler which is intended to go live at an optimum time coming from the scheduler may not always perform as well as compared to something being posted live, real time, as it happens.
  • When using social media platforms, there will be varying softwares that one would use. These softwares has the tendency to have bugs or to have issues that can cause scheduling issues, image issues, not rendering the image the way that you want it to, not picking up on links in the same way other social media platform might. So, there’s still like little nuisances about it which can impact the performance of the social media management tool.

 

As an agency, we use social media platforms because we have to juggle different accounts since we have multiple clients and it’s a helpful tool for us.

So, we have a mixed of strategies where we use these social media platforms but we ensure that we select how these platforms can add value to the posts and content that we manage.

For instance, we’ll schedule some things in Facebook then we will use a third-party tool, a software, to manage our LinkedIn and Instagram. Then, we post live to Instagram, and we approve that live from our phones as it happens. It’s the same thing that we do when scheduling posts in twitter.

If you’re a franchise business and you have a hundred outlets around the country and you need to be responsible at a national level for posting across all of them, then, a tool like a Hootsuite, is very valuable in having multiple pages, and being able to create one post that’s gets posted across multiple pages helps you save tons of effort and time.

Meanwhile, if you’re a business startup that is just posting across multiple platforms such as LinkedIn, twitter, Instagram, Facebook as an example then it may be overkill and may not be necessary to have a social media management platform. I’d suggest to better spend the energy and time in making sure that your content is more relevant to the individual platforms and the audiences that are on those platforms rather than just trying to make it more convenient to get that content out there.

Ultimately, for businesses that are looking into using these social media platforms, whether you are a small startup or a large corporation, I’d suggest to look at the pricing, the features and how well these platforms can help scale your business and reach your target audience.