Dislike?

Social Media has become the most popular marketing tool for the past few years. The benefits of using social media had attracted tons of company to change their marketing strategies and adopted social media as a key element in them. However, do social media guarantee these companies a “happily ever after” future?

I am very interested in the downside of social media since me myself don’t use social media as a channel for searching products I needed, and still wonder how attractive it is to customers.

According to a study from the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Project, 27% of Facebook users surveyed in the U.S. plan to spend less time on the site in 2013. (With only 3% plan to spend more). In U.S., people are starting to get tired of all kinds of social  media and don't think it is "cool" anymore. There are also all kinds of arguments about how social network is affecting our lives in a negative way. (Such as the second statistic of my last post!)

So, if we move to a business perspective, what are the downsides of using social media?

The risk of words of mouth

The spread of news nowadays is whole lot a different from the past. Blogs, social networks, video screening websites had make the news spread in a very fast pace. The good news is, if you got positive feed back from your customers, others will know soon. However, the bad news comes along, if you got negative feedback from customers, is also spread out incredibly fast and no matter it's true or not.

The sense of being manipulated

If the posts and comments are consistently positive on company's webpage, customers might think it is "too good to be true", and even generate a negative impression about the product. Also, another point that been discussed in my Digital Marketplaces class is that, customers might get the feeling that they are being manipulated by companies, and might ask themselves "What are they trying to do here?"

Privacy issue

Privacy issue has been a longtime concern of social media, and is still going on right now. There are so many social networking websites and most of them require some personal information from us when we register, such as email account, gender, cellphone number or our preference of certain product. These information can be use to make profit, besides, how do we know that these company won't sell out our information?
If a customer has concern about his/her private information, there is a great chance that he/she will reduce the chance of using social media, or even resist using it.

Social media has already proved itself as an effective way of promote product or increase brand awareness, but the customers are still watching, and companies should be more careful when using it.