Question 2

 

2. What are the advantages and disadvantages of using social media for advertising, brand building, market research and customer service?

Advantages:

•    Advertising: Twitter has developed new offerings for advertisers like Promoted Tweets and Promoted Trends. These features give advertisers the ability to have their tweets displayed more prominently when Twitter users search for certain keywords.

•    Brand building: The Levi’s Facebook page has 500,000 “Like” message posted by friends sharing their favorite jeans.

•    Market research: Wrigleyville Sports has been building a Facebook following for over three years. It also uses email campaigns and Twitter postings to announce promotions. It tracks purchases related to its promotions and is able to tell which promotions yield the most profitable new customers.

•    Customer service: Traditional marketing is all about creating and delivering a message using communication that is primarily one-way. But social media marketing is all about two-way communication and interaction. It enables businesses to receive an immediate response to a message and to react and change the message if necessary. For example, Best Buy’s Twitter responders, called the “Twelp Force”, answer user questions and respond to complaints. That keeps customers satisfied and away from posting negative tweets on their own.

Disadvantages:

•    Negative feedback: Consumers can create positive or negative feedback or comments depends on how the company present online and the quality of products or services. Even though you can decrease the impact of negative comments through quick response, you cannot nullify it. Negative feedback may damage company’s reputation and exposing business to the possibility of negative publicity. For example, Starbuck’s social media contest backfired on the company when people posted negative pictures of protesters holding signs criticizing its labor practices.

•    Privacy and security issues: Burger King’s Twitter account was hacked in early 2013, its logo was replaced by a McDonald’s logo and rogue announcements appeared including one that Burger King had been sold to a competitor. Other posts were unprintable. Jeep was hacked a day later. Hackers replaced the company’s thumbnail image with a one for Cadillac. (Cadillac is a division of General Motors while Jeep is a division of Chrysler.)

•    Unpredictable: The results of a social presence can be unpredictable and not always beneficial as a number of companies have learned. Business do not have much control in the placement of their Facebook advertisement which are largely based on computer algorithms. For example, in late May of 2013, after failing to get Facebook to remove pages glorifying violence against women, feminist activists waged a digital media campaign highlighting companies whose advertisements appeared alongside the offensive pages, Nissan and a number of small companies temporarily removed their advertisements from the sites and Facebook removed the oages in question.