The Downside of Social Media

With all the hype about social media marketing do you find yourself asking what’s the catch? Nothing’s all peaches and roses surely there must be a downside to social media marketing. If you’re asking these questions you are right to do so. While I believe the benefits of social media marketing greatly out way the negatives, there are several common pit falls. In an attempt to give you both sides of the coin and not just what can go right, here are 7 common pit falls in social media marketing.

1. Your Campaign Never Gets off the Ground

While an advertising campaign not getting steam is not a unique problem to social media, is can be more common. Because of the opt-in nature of social media there is a danger that the online community will decide to not pay attention to your advertising attempts.

2. Blogger Backlash

The web makes bad reviews or customer complaints worse. In print a bad review eventually goes away and people forget about it. This is not necessarily true online. Because of the way search engines work, your customers could fine bad reviews, or positive ones, that are years old.

3. You Don’t Have Control

One the scary thing about social media is that you don’t have complete control over the marketing campaign. At least a portion of the campaign is given to your customers and critics. Giving up some of the control is a double edged sword, it can give you genuine feedback and propel your brand or it can backfire if your products or services are not well received in the online community.

4. You Get Rejected

While your product getting rejected by the online community is always a danger, it’s not any more of a danger than your product getting rejected in the real world.

5. You Lose Steam

Often social media marketing starts off with a bang and everything goes great. But then for one reason or another, you stop pouring the same amount of attention and care into your social media outlets. Your posts become further and further apart, your followers trickle away, and eventually your whole campaign dies. Social media marketing is a marathon not a sprint. Remember that it’ll be time consuming when you start and it’ll be time consuming until you stop. If you neglect your social media presence it will fade away.

6. Ignore Other Forms of Marketing

Social media marketing is fantastic but it should be one tactic in your advertising arsenal. Don’t forget to take advantage of all the conventional means of advertising. You probably have customers looking for you offline, don’t forget about them.

7. You Succeed Faster Than You Thought You Would

I know what you’re thinking. If that’s problem I want problems. While I grant that this is a good problem to have, it is still a problem. Twitter is an excellent example. When Twitter first launched it would often crash and show a picture of a whale being carried by birds. This became known as the fail whale and is now synonymous with frustrating user experience. Too much success too fast can create a myriad of problems.


Even though we just spent a while talking about everything that might go wrong, remember that by in large, social media marketing will benefit your business.