Social Media Marketing for Mobile Apps: Evaluating the Pros and Con

​Social media is no longer a medium to find your long-lost friend. Social media is now a robust marketing channel to connect to a broader audience and develop a brand. From furniture retailer to the food-joint next door to a large hotelier brand, all businesses irrespective of their size and outreach cannot ignore social media out of their marketing strategy.
 
If as a retailer you are building a mobile app, it is quite obvious that you would like to connect your audience on social media first. For instance, if you are a producer of utility furniture for offices and homes, offering a mobile app to help your loyal users stay connected is a smart move. But mobile app developers delivering you a custom business-focused app is not enough. You need to market the app push higher user acquisition and business conversion. For this social media marketing can be a credible low-investment alternative.
 
In spite of the lucrative promise of social media marketing as a cheaper and high-engagement channel, it has its loopholes as well. It can often end up taking up a lot of time with no significant business output. This is why it is essential to evaluate the pros and cons of social media marketing for mobile app development in detail.
 
Pros of Social Media Marketing for Mobile Apps
 
Let's start with the pros of social media marketing for mobile app development and marketing. Many of these pros literally helped startups and new businesses embrace social media more than traditional media ads and marketing channels. Let's have a look at them.
 

• Cost-Effective Marketing Channel: You don't need a penny to start your own business page and profiles and start connecting your audience with relevant posts. Even when you would opt for paid ads, the budget will be far less than the media ads.
• Consistent Traction: Social media over a period of time helps you creating a brand image for your business. By maintaining regularity and frequency, you can easily build an audience that engages with you and looks up to your contents.
• SEO and ASO Benefits: Social media helps boosting traffic footfall on your website and the app store page of your app. When you need to engage the audience across channels, social media works like the connecting dot between the web and mobile app.
• Customer Service: Social media is a great marketing channel to provide customer service by getting real-time access to customer feedback. You can handle customer queries, solve issues, address customer grievances, make promotional offers and make event announcements through social channels.
• Conduct Market Research: Every business wants to get ahead of the competition simply by delivering to the trends and market dynamics. Social media presence helps a business constantly keeping a tap on the user moods, market trends and all aspects that can have a direct or indirect impact on the business outcome.
• Boosting Brand Loyalty: Social media also helps in maintaining relationships with loyal users and socialising with the customers to boost brand loyalty. Brand loyalty, in the long run, helps a brand to get consistent attention and business conversion.
• Personalised Marketing: Unlike traditional media and ads, social media helps businesses to create cosy places to hold a conversation with their target audience. This helps the brand to maintain a unique human voice in communication and address the audience more personally. Addressing the audience in a personalised manner helps a brand to gain more traction.  
• Level Playing Field: Lastly, social media offers a level playing field for big and small brands. A small local brand can compete with a big brand simply on the merit of quality contents and frequency of engagement.

 
Cons of Social Media Marketing for Mobile Apps
 
As we have mentioned, in spite of all the advantages that made social media as popular as a marketing channel, it has its own range of drawbacks and shortcomings as well. Let us have a look at the typical cons of social media marketing.
 

• Time-consuming: Social media marketing demands consistent involvement requiring a lot of productive time. You constantly need to keep a tap on the trends and the conversation and accordingly make contents that can draw the attention of your target audience.
• Social media is distracting: There are too many social media channels, and you often cannot beat the temptation of creating accounts and pages across a lot of channels. Ultimately, you can maintain a presence across a selected few. Even while using one social media, the outpouring of contents of various types can always distract your attention leading to non-productive entertainment or content consumption. 
• It takes longer to see the credible result: Social media demands a considerable investment of time and energy before it starts laying out in terms of traffic and profits. It takes a considerably longer time to gain on ROI by using social media.
• Negative publicity: Any dissatisfied customer or a former employee or a competitor with vindictive comments can make negative publicity about your brand and work to ruin the reputation. You need to give extra efforts to counter such negative publicity with proactive steps and contents.

 
Conclusion
 
While these pros and cons are part of your digital marketing mix, you cannot undermine the role of social media to promote your business far and wide. Social media channels will continue to attract more businesses and pose competition to traditional marketing in the time to come.
 
About Author:
Juned Ghanchi is the co-founder and CMO of IndianAppDevelopers company which offers to hire app developers in India for mobility solutions, Juned helps connect app development firm to prospective clients with the power of research and marketing strategy.