Social Media may give reach to mass audience but it makes difficult for business to pull right kind of people to turn them into customers compare to other media. Other media allow you to reach targetted audience, say a newpaper like Economic Times will only interest business news readers but when you create a company profile on facebook you reach mass audience i.e. entire pool of facebook users. When you put thoughts or advertisements in newspaper, it might reach 1 Lakh people and may interest 5000 people (5%). But on facebook, it will reach approx 30 crores and will interest 500000 (0.2%). Finding customers through social media is like finding water in desert.
But there are still some benefit of social media:
- No. of audience is massive.
- They are interactive. You can reply back and ask your questions to the advertiser like in Orkut profile of a company you can scrap them or start a discussion for review in a community. They are not forcible like television, newspaper or pamphlates, where you have to make a judgement with limited amount of information.
- They do not bother audience to share their bandwidth like tele-calling, door selling. Ultimately, a person will only log-in when he intend to do so.
- Most of them are for free.
It is up to business to decide their approach how they want to use it. I believe we can not be dependent on social media for marketing but it is the best for creating awareness.
