Thousands of companies all over the world use social media in order to attract more business and a chain of communication with their consumers. The reason for this is because there are a number of benefits to doing this. These include being able to have direct contact with consumers, it is another channel of communication to advertise through and everything is measurable through social media and can be analysed to further understand the consumer. Issues or risks with social media include the accidentally tweeting something inappropriate through human error, clicking on phishing links which cause security risks and having complaints to the company go viral and seen by anyone.

Opportunities

Social media is an incredible tool for businesses to use, which is why it is so popular. When businesses use social media, it allows them to use social communication channels to reach a wider audience that they may not reach using SEO or other digital marketing initiatives. This creates more opportunities for that business to make a sale, as they are reaching more potential customers. Using social media for a business is also useful as it allows businesses to use analytics and metrics to understand their customer further (Valos et al, 2017). This is by finding out the most common interests of their followers, how many people interact with post, how many people followed through and bought a product. This will allow businesses to understand their market and narrow down the people they should target with advertising. Another opportunity that social media creates is using it as a customer service tool. If a customer is happy with the service of a company, they may tweet or post about their satisfaction of the service or product received. If a customer is complaining about a product or service, the company can use the social media platform to show their good customer service. As this is on social media, any member of the public can see this and this can give a good impression, which could lead to a future customer.

Risks

Although using social media is a key tool and useful initiative for many companies, it still comes with some risks. An example of a common risk on social media is if a customer service issue is dealt with poorly, customers can take to social media and criticise the company for the public to see. This could lead in a fall in followers or even prevent future sales and consumer engagement (Valos et al, 2017). Another risk of using social media is the human error of posting something accidently that could be inappropriate or negative to their image. This can often make customers lose trust in the company and can cause a drop in followers and sales. One more risk from the use of social media is an account being hacked into and people embarrassing the brand. An example of this was Burger King, when hackers made Burger King look like McDonalds had bought it
out (Russell, 2018). This is embarrassing for the brand image.

Things to Consider

Investing money into sponsored and boosted posts will allow companies to receive a larger reach. This is because social media can be used as a sales conversion funnel. If a company were to produce entertaining or engaging content on their social media channels, this could be a great influence for a customer to buy a product.

Not only is using social media to generate traffic to a website is effective, businesses must make sure they are using the most effective social media channels (Tuten and Solomon, 2015). This can be done by analysing which social media platform is generating the most consistent likes, shares and engagements with the posts (Flores, 2013). Making sure the company are using the most effective social media channel allows them to generate more relevant traffic (Farris, 2010).

References

Farris, P. (2010). Marketing metrics. 2nd ed. Harlow: Financial Times Prentice Hall/Pearson Education.

Flores, L. (2013). How to measure digital marketing. 1st ed. Palgrave Macmillan.

Russell, J. (2018). 5 Social Media Security Risks and How to Avoid Them. [online] Hootsuite Social Media Management. Available at: https://blog.hootsuite.com/social-media-security-for-business/ [Accessed 25 Feb. 2018].

Tuten, T. and Solomon, M. (2015). Social media marketing. 2nd ed. Harlow: SAGE.

Valos, M., Maplestone, V., Polonsky, M. and Ewing, M. (2017). Integrating social media within an integrated marketing communication decision-making framework. Journal of Marketing Management, 33(17-18), pp.1522-1558.