Is There a Downside in Developing a Social Marketing Campaign?
Yes there is a downside to social marketing campaigns to work in tandem with your website or business. While there have been many articles written about the advantages of social media and the implementation of a social media campaign, there are a number of important downsides which it pays to be aware of.
For those brave souls who have realized the importance of social media and dared to develop and manage their own campaigns, the most prominent drawback they have realized is the great amount of time involved. To develop even one social media site takes quite a bit of time. First, time is needed to develop a great social page that visitors will enjoy. Then the daily maintenance of adding posts, marketing the site and keeping fresh content will eat up more of your week. Your business and your social site’s authority will directly reflect the amount of time you put into this effort.
These types of campaigns are very hands-on intensive and typically involve ongoing networking and very subtle promotion of your brand and business. Generating relevant content for your business or brand is one of the most important things you can do to develop a successful campaign.
You want to develop a public profile on forums that are relevant to the markets you are trying to enter. To be successful at this, you would need to commit to being a regular contributing member of a forum site, generating thoughtful, relevant and accurate tips, advice and content for the readers of that forum. Submitting one post full of links and then walking away will get you nowhere. Many quality forums and especially forums with significant PR, will not let you post links until after a predetermined amount of time, to prevent link spammers. If you do not regularly contribute to this account you just created, your profiles can lose traction and your on-line footprint will fade from this online landscape that you just left your mark on. This is just one of many strategies which take up your budgeted time for online marketing.
Many businesses will pursue social marketing campaigns as an ongoing strategy and commit to the hours necessary to be successful. Some will spend 10-20 hours plus a week in one form or another in developing their social media identity and others will pursue outsourcing this service to online marketing professionals. Many business web hosting companies now offer these services. For any business to succeed with social media as a means of growing their business, they must maintain a long term focus of investing the time and/or money necessary in developing quality content for their social networking campaign to succeed.
