Strengths and Weaknesses of Social Media platforms.

Social media marketing has its strengths and weaknesses but overall, it’s a strong force within digital marketing and it allows for products to become viral through social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Advantages and disadvantages will be bullet pointed below.

Strengths of Facebook:

·         Companies and businesses can create brand awareness through Facebook, by having a large enough presence and activity through a Facebook page can gain exposure to consumers

·         Customer feedback is a great advantage as businesses can review reviews left by customers by leaving a written review and also, companies can directly come in contact with their consumers through Facebook Messenger which is a great asset to Facebook

·         Through Facebook, you can advertise directly to the type of targeted audience that your product or service will suit best, for example, what gender, age, hair colour, geographical region etc.

·         Through Facebook, companies can improve their SEOs. Many tools can be easily added to your website, in result, you will be able to publish any content on Facebook from your website.

Weaknesses of Facebook:

• ·         For businesses, Facebook can be very time consuming on a day to day basis. Having a larger company requires responding to frequently asked questions, handling negative feedback accordingly and overall, maintaining a positive reputation. If a Facebook page becomes out of hand, it can result in a negative impact in the company.
• ·         To manage a Facebook page, especially for larger companies, a staff member may be required. It is important that they have the right skills, or else they might not be able to respond to negative feedback very effectively.
• ·         Creating a Facebook page, can be slow and frustrating, with growing a large following can take years. Often companies have to run competitions, often requiring consumers to “like, comment and share” to gain exposure to a wider audience.
• ·         Subscriptions on a Facebook page can prove to be difficult for a business. If a consumer isn’t happy with the content posted on the page, they can easily unsubscribe from your page, which results in a difficulty in trying to measure how many people are viewing your feeds.

Rich Media: Strengths and Weaknesses

Rich media is a type of advertising that solely uses advanced technology such as video streaming, video clips, flash games, that allow businesses to interact with their audience through digital media.

Strengths of Rich Media:

• ·         Rich media has a high interaction rate with their audience as through rich media, companies can include videos and live streaming, which in turn can result in audiences being able to interact with the ads more, and result in brands improving their companies.
• ·        Rich media allows for the growing of social media platforms as companies are not restricted to only being able to link to one social media platform.
• ·        With rich media, businesses can create any sort of campaign to scale depending on their needs and on their budget all the while having a substantial impact on the market.
• ·        By advertising with rich media, there are definite higher performance levels in comparison to standard non-rich media ads. Figures show that the average click through rates are five times higher than click though rates for non-rich media ads.

Weaknesses of Rich Media:

• ·        Rich media ads have a tendency to be more expensive than regular ads as they are quite difficult to create
• ·        Many of the files for rich media are quite large and can often slow down the browsing you do on a particular website. They often take quite a bit of time to download.
• ·        Unfortunately, when viewing videos online, there is a lot of ad avoidance. Many viewers want to skip the ads after five seconds and many don’t pay attention. As rich media ads are quite expensive, this can be a blow to your campaign.

Strengths and weaknesses of Twitter:

Strengths

• ·         The length of Twitter messages are easy to use for companies. They are short, clear and concise. The fact they are 140 characters makes it easy to do this. Because of this, marketing on Twitter is easy to gain exposure without spending all day writing a piece.
•      Twitter allows businesses to lower their marketing expenses. To set up a page it costs no amount of money. Companies can advertise on Twitter for a much cheaper price and will reach 1000 times more people in a short space of time.

•          On Twitter, not everybody is going to like your page and retweet your tweets, but if you build enough of a following, you can reach a much more targeted audience depending on consumer’s interest in your product or service.

•  ·         Using Twitter for marketing is very effective as you can reach your businesses main promoters directly and they can connect with you.

Weaknesses of Twitter

• ·         There is a possibility that a staff member can be put in charge of your businesses Twitter page which can lead to negative feedback from consumers and disappointing marketing campaigns depending on their skills.
• ·         Unlike Facebook, Twitter requires fast responses as a tweet has a greater chance of becoming viral at a more rapid pace, if complaints aren’t responded to quick enough, a negative effect come upon your business.
• ·         Hacks on Twitter are a definite trend. If you are not careful in securing your page, hackers could potentially damage your brand reputation, dependent on what they write.
• ·         As there are so many tweets tweeted at the same time, your tweet could be missed if it does not grab the attention of your audience.
•