EDU10010: Critical Evaluation of Social Media Marketing Strategies

This essay critically evaluates social media marketing, exploring its advantages and disadvantages in the context of business and consumer behavior. It begins by defining social media marketing and its historical emergence, highlighting platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. The essay then delves into the benefits, such as enhanced brand identity, improved communication with consumers, and the ability to track customer feedback. It also examines drawbacks like employee distraction, challenges to confidentiality, and the rise of cybercrime. The essay uses examples to support its arguments and references several scholarly sources. It concludes by emphasizing that, while social media marketing offers significant opportunities, it also presents challenges that require careful consideration. The essay also mentions the negative impact on students and recommends a schedule for using social media to prevent it from affecting personal and professional life.

Language and Learning in your Discipline
Critical Evaluation of Social Media Marketing
Ailin Kvalheim Bergetun
Southern Cross University
30.09.19

Marketing or advertising methods has been provided with the new trend of promotion
through social media platforms. Before discussing the advantages and drawbacks of social
media marketing, it is required to know the history of its emergence. The term social media
reflexively reminds about platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and
Pinterest. These social media platforms flourished during the years of 2003-2004. These
platforms built a huge connection between people staying at a distance and almost half of the
entire world population is using these platforms randomly (Whiting & Deshpande 2014).
Hence, marketing through these platforms has become a great idea to promote a business or
any particular product. Social media marketing refers to promotion of any business name of
product through the mode of advertisement on various social media platforms (Tuten &
Solomon 2017). This essay will highlight some of the advantages and disadvantages of social
media marketing and its effect of human life. The use of social media marketing strategy for
advertising will be given a proper demonstration from the student’s perspective.
Social media is a global platform of communication. Social media marketing has a
great impact on the business industry. Business agencies are getting along with the new
strategies to promote their names in social media. There are different ways to promote the
business including content posting, blog posting, and video posting related to the business or
any particular product. Hence, it can be said that social media platforms widen up a new way
of communication between the agencies and their consumers (Godey et al. 2016. It helps to
establish the brand identity or brand recognition of a particular business. Along with this,
marketing through social media advertising attracts the potential customers related to the
product or business. For example, a fashion blog or video only the people with same interest
will view and share it with other persons with same interest. Sharing is the only procedure
that social media is using it to promote awareness about a particular business, product, or
person. Hence, it can be said that social media marketing strengthens the mode of
communication between the business owners and the consumers.
Social media marketing helps to track adverse or ambiguous statements.
Monitoring the negative comments about any business organisation is challenging. However,
social media has a section where the business agency can track the negative remarks about
themselves and alter accordingly (Ashley & Tuten 2015). This particular section helps the
business organisation to impose an improving attitude for their own business organisation to
generate awareness about their existence. Through this advantage, business agencies can
conduct self-assessment attitude for themselves and for the sake of their ideal customers. Not
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only the business organisation, but also the entrepreneurs also getting high benefit from this
marketing strategy.
Customisation is a concept that has a greater advantage of advertising through social
media. Digital advertising gives the business owner a huge scope to design the advertisement
with own design. For example, a fashion designer can post related contents or pictures or
video showing exhibiting own innovation. Customizing the designs of the advertisement is a
new trend possible only with the digital technology infused with the concept of automation.
This concept makes the handling of marketing posts easier at the social media platforms
(Albarran 2013). Users can share their posts and article on the platforms to the particular
persons they want to share with. Similarly, they can remove unwanted contents and posts or
persons from their page to strengthen the online visibility only for their potential customers.
Entertainment is a field that has given an entirely new attire by the social media
platforms. Entertainment refers to film, art, music, and dance that people use for revival from
the daily monotony (Nadaraja & Yazdanifard 2013). In this digital era, consumers are using
social media platforms instead of television and audio players for the entertainment purpose.
Consumers can take the advantage of uninterrupted films or music in smart devices. Hence,
the field of entertainment is highly benefitted by the concept of social media marketing.
Applications such as amazon prime or amazon music are example of platforms providing
uninterrupted films and music to the users. Apart from this, social media platforms is not
limited at home or workplace only. Research has been found that consumers selects those
multiplex or theatre halls who provide free surfing of the internet while watching any movie.
Theatres promote their facility with digital advertising that is increasing their annual revenue.
Contrarily, social media marketing has its dark side on the same field namely business
industry. It has been observed that use of social media platforms by the employees can be
incongruous if it diverges them from the core intention. Excessive use of social media at the
office premise for personal reason often fluctuates the mind of the employees from their
professional responsibilities. Hence, many agencies facilitate strict restriction on the use of
social media platforms during the office hours. Marketing through social media can question
the matter of confidentiality of a business organisation. Safeguarding the confidential matter
of a company is becoming challenging living in this digital era. According to the Australian
guidelines for advertising through digital media especially for the influencer, industry is
residing at a grey phase (Ellison & Boyd 2013). The regulation mandates two aspects for the
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influencer to abide by for marketing purpose that includes realistic level of mechanism and
the material should have relevance with advertising purpose only.
Students are negatively impacted by the use of social media recently. According to the
psychological study, use of social media is highly addictive in nature. Students spend their
precious times surfing the internet and spending time on the social media platforms. They are
providing less time for studies. Sometimes, the student is found to use the social media while
studying that leads to fluctuation of attention and poor results (Vinerean et al. 2013).
Australian Government mentioned some restrictions on the use of digital devices for the
students in respect of every age group. For the teenagers, the government regulation allows
less than one hour per day to be spent on electronic gadgets. Not only the young generation,
but the Australian Government provide various rules and regulations on adult use also.
Hacking is another drawback in the field of social media marketing. False tweeter
account or false Facebook account is common issue found in this use of social media.
Hackers are using misleading advertisements of obscene posts on social media to generate
negative reputation for any particular business agency (Gainsbury et al. 2016). The hackers
also thieving the confidential documents from the companies. Promotion of social media is
giving birth to cybercrime and restricting the fair use of it especially in the field of marketing.
However, companies are taking initiatives to address the loopholes of social media to drive
the profits only from it. Studies have found that only the web designing, and application
development agencies are getting highly benefitted by social media marketing among the
entire business industry.
The strategy of social media marketing is extremely exposed or transparent.
Traditional mode of advertising including word of mouth provide the consumers the
information from an existing buyer. Apart from the mode of word of mouth, traditional way
of marketing involved television and radio broadcasting. A new consumer will trust the
existing buyer and think about the brand accordingly (Dwivedi, Kapoor & Chen 2015). The
advertisement at social media platforms provide an open forum for users to express their
experience that can be positive or negative. The open comments on the business organisation
or any particular product creates confusion for the new buyers. Hence, the business
organisation can lose potential customers for their products. This is how brand transparency
is affecting the growth of the business and becoming threat for social media marketing. In
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one-word, social media marketing giving rise to negative user experience in regard to the
entire business industry (Felix & Hinsch 2017).
In conclusion, it can be said that the use of social media marketing is observed with
various advantages and disadvantages at the same time. Business agencies including web
designing and development is highly benefitted to promote these strategies. Agencies can
track the negative and positive comment by the consumers to track their position and
dwelling on the top pages of the search results. Entertainment is another field to generate
impressive revenue imposing the strategies of social media marketing. As a contrasting
research, social media marketing is identified with various negative impact on different
fields. At the office premise, it is depriving the employee motivation from the office
responsibilities. Young generation is randomly using the social media platforms instead of
spending their precious times in studying. Digital marketing has given rise to cybercrime or
the concept of hacking at a certain level. Hence, the government implementing numerous
rules and regulations to control the effects of social media platform on the entire generation.
Australian government made separate regulations for the young generation and the adults to
limit the use of social media and smart devices. Additionally, the paper recommends making
a schedule for using the social media that cannot directly affect the personal and professional
life. Social media marketing is grabbing the attention of human being and tempting them to
spend many time electronic gadgets instead of verbal conversation.
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References
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Ashley, C & Tuten, T 2015, “Creative strategies in social media marketing: An exploratory
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Dwivedi, YK, Kapoor, KK & Chen, H 2015, “Social media marketing and advertising”, The
Marketing Review, vol. 15, no. 3, pp. 289-309.
Ellison, NB. & Boyd, DM 2013, Sociality through social network sites. In The Oxford
handbook of internet studies.
Felix, R, Rauschnabel, PA & Hinsch, C 2017, “Elements of strategic social media marketing:
A holistic framework”, Journal of Business Research, vol. 70, pp. 118-126.
Gainsbury, SM, King, DL, Russell, AM, Delfabbro, P, Derevensky, J & Hing, N 2016,
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