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Facebook has grown into the largest social media network and has more than 2 billion profiles. With 1 billion plus active monthly users, Facebook provides a lot of opportunity to social media marketers. Companies and organizations are using Facebook to promote their products and services and have extensively used Facebook Pages to promote their brand.

Brand pages provide an excellent platform for promoting but it has its own set of pros and cons. In this article we will look into some of the pros and cons of Facebook advertising. It has been observed that thoughtfully crafted ad campaigns may deliver excellent results in driving traffic compared to ads which are aimed at increasing page likes and reach.

Also for a marketer it is important to understand that Facebook marketing is not for everyone. A B2B business may not benefit as much as compared to a B2C brand. For example a company into IT based services may not get the best out of Facebook advertising but a salon, restaurant, or a FMCG company will get the expected results.

Here are some pros & cons of Facebook advertising.

Pro: It’s not expensive

Facebook offers one of the lowest advertising fee for 1000 impressions. For a small time business Facebook is an affordable medium to promote. For less than $50 you can get the desired reach within your targeted audience. For small B2C organizations, setting aside a small budget for Facebook ads is easily possible.

Con: Pay per View

Facebook has been promoting Facebook ads and it has been observed that paid content gets more views. Over years pages have created followers who are now not able to see their content even after liking pages. This is frustrating for marketers who have to pay for getting viewed even after posting quality content.

Pro: Specific Targeting

Facebook allows marketers to micro target among the audience. Marketers can micro target based on parameters such as demographics, marital status, location, and more. This helps marketers to reach the specific audience that they want to target. This method is economical for the marketer and he saves by not advertising to an audience which is not specific.   

Con: Reduced Organic Reach

As people like more pages and befriend more people on Facebook, the organic content that reaches the user’s page reduces. But if the content goes viral then it still gets  good visibility. However, quality content is not just one criteria for good reach and view. The algorithm plays a very important part in deciding on what content gets and does not get views. The trick is to keep posting quality content over the platform and the approach should be content driven. 

The bottom line is a marketer should know the audience and the results they are expecting from a campaign. If the results align with the goal of the brand then they should opt for Facebook marketing or else seek other options.

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Increasing social media fondness has given a boost to social media marketing. Twitter, one of the favored social media channels for business, has seen rapid growth in recent times. But Twitter marketing also comes with a few drawbacks. Marketers many a times do not consider the inefficiencies and focus only on the advantages which result in failure in the promotion strategy. Here we have listed some of the advantages as well as disadvantages of Twitter Marketing for a business.

Pros

Multiplicities of Ads

Twitter lets a business promote its brand in various forms, for example, “promoted tweet”. A promoted tweet lets a particular tweet to be pushed on to the timelines of users that match your target segment, which encourages them to follow the handle and can even click on the links on the tweet landing up to various business pages of your brand. Businesses can also promote trends, which appear in the search box in the app and on the left side of the timeline on browser.

Reach

Reaching millions of twitter users is a benefit for any particular business looking for reach. Thanks to Twitter’s segmented databases it reduces time for companies to narrow down their segment and can hit their targeted section’s timeline in no time.

Shortened URL:

Twitter allows shortening the URL for any target webpage of your brand on which you need users to land up. It also saves the characters being used in a particular tweet giving more space for the message as well. With the recent update on twitter, it shortens the URL as much as it can just by updating the number of characters used in the URL and inserting into the post. Simple huh!

Scheduled Tweets

Businesses now can schedule Tweets to be posted in the future.  Both organic and promoted-only Tweets can be scheduled for future delivery, and as needed, coordinated to go live with new or existing campaigns. Anything that can be planned in advance can be scheduled, such as new product releases or regular updates. In addition, you can use this feature to publish Tweets on the weekend, evenings, or other inconvenient times — to keep your Twitter presence lively around the clock. Tweets can be scheduled up to a year in advance and to 1-minute regularity. Apart from it, several online tools are available such as Hootsuite, Twittimer etc. which allow you to schedule tweets when you are unavailable for tweeting. Very helpful!

Cons

Expensive

Not to forget that the twitter promoted trends cost very high in comparison to other social media ad cost. The high cost of twitter marketing can be one of the major drawbacks for the companies that want to promote their brands on twitter!

Difficult to derive the correct ROI

It becomes a challenging job to derive the ROI for investment made in Twitter Ads. For example, say someone clicked on the ad by mistake and it gets counted in the data as a click for the ad but that’s a wasted click for your business!

Spamming

Promoting on twitter rigorously can prove a business as a spammer too! Once a business is on twitter the behavior of that particular handle is being judged and if that is too disturbing for the people less interested in your product/services they can negate your business’ reputation even without your knowledge. Tough thing!

Marketing on social media is easy and fun but it comes with many disadvantages and hence before stepping up social media activities you must be aware of all the possible consequences. Twitter is one of the most widely used social media platforms and has a user database that can boost any business at any given point of time. But to choose twitter for promotion one must have patience for interacting and engaging with users honestly, which will help the business in the long run.