Common Challenges in Social Media for Businesses

Social media has become a part of people’s lives and also a necessary part of all businesses. Without social media, no business can survive, even if it is digital or conventional. People watch many product ads and posts and then decide to purchase or neglect them.

But the use of social media, promoting businesses and products, running ads, staying present, and consistently posting is not easy. Businesses face many challenges like a sudden change in algorithms, rates, and strategies, of social media platforms. 

In this article, I wrote about some of the common challenges that businesses face when using social media with their solutions with my best knowledge, experience, and research.

Let’s discuss these most prominent challenges one by one with solutions:

1. Creating Trust Among Audience

A lot of fraudulent, phishing, and deceit, happen with innocent people daily. People hesitate to click on the links or to purchase from online stores. They fear losing their money, and data and receiving quality products.

As real businesses are growing on social media, fake businesses and cheaters growing there too. They always try to sabotage people’s lives and money. They want to become wealthy very soon to loot other’s wealth with phishing and fraud.

Due to these types of cheaters real businesses face challenges in creating trust among the audience. Until their audience purchase and found quality products.

            Solutions:

a. Businesses should reply to every message of the audience with real data and backup to create trust. Comments, shares, and likes on the posts could also develop the trust among audience.

b. Sending gifts relating to your products and business could help to create trust among the audience.

c. Guaranty of replacing and returning your product after purchasing could create trust among the audience.

2. Keeping up with Immediate Changing Social Trends

Businesses schedule their posts and ads for a week and a month. But trends immediately appeared and all the people started discussions, sharing, commenting on immediate trends, and also ignoring other’s posts. People also search about these trends to find more knowledge about the events of trends.

In these immediately changing trends situations, businesses have to reschedule their posts with new content. They waste money that expended on creating and scheduling previous content. Also required more money and time to create, post, and schedule new content including trends events.

            Solutions:

a. Don’t schedule your posts for more than 2 or 3 days.

b. Keep your social media management team up to date and ready to create new trending content.

c. Invest in the right social management and content creation tools that can create and post linked to trends content immediately.

3. Calculating the ROI of Social Media investment

Social media teams mostly fail to calculate the actual ROI of social media investing. The management complained of not providing satisfactory data. There are no right tools available that can be linked with sales and social media expenses to find the actual ROI.

Some posts increase sales immediately but most of the posts fail to do so. They also don’t find the impact of all the posts on their businesses.

            Solutions:

a. Keep and update a record of your posts and ads along with achievements in a spreadsheet to show and calculate ROI.

b. Explain to management or owners the impact of social media investment is not only an increase in the sale but it also increases goodwill and trust of business in the market. You can’t calculate goodwill and trust.

4. Lost Time from Juggling Multiple Social Platforms

A few years ago, only Facebook and YouTube were the main social media platforms, but now a huge list of social media networks is available. Posting, replying, commenting, and sharing data on many social media platforms is a time–, energy-, and money-taking task.

When people especially businessmen start posting, their other tasks go into the pending list.  Therefore, the activities of businesses are disturbed due to not providing full focus there.

            Solutions:

a. Hire a social media expert or team to manage social media.

b. Purchase social media tools that make and manage tasks easily.

c. Fix your time for every activity in advance.

5. Balance Paid & Organic Content

Social media networks have both types of traffic for a post, organic and paid. But businesses can’t balance them. Nowadays, as per new marketing strategies for all social media networks, paid content can capture more traffic than organic.

But the audience wants more organic traffic than paid. Audiences want to watch their according to their passion and interest, but not in the interest of companies. Businesses face the challenge of balancing paid and organic content.

            Solutions:

a. Post only the content that your audience wants to watch, value their interests not only your business.

6. Trends and Algorithms

Business people don’t create difference in trends and algorithms. They understand both are from social media management. Therefore they post according to the algorithm requirement and neglect trends or do it in reverse.

            Solutions:

a. Businessmen should learn social media management to understand and benefit from trends and algorithms.

b. Hire social media experts to manage and take more benefits from it.

7. Running out of creative content ideas

Posting regularly on social media is not easy, and requires new topics, new content, and new designs. Businesses mostly face this challenge on social media platforms. If they don’t post regularly the audience forgets them, social media don’t rank their posts and accounts, and their competitors leave them behind. Their sales and business also reduce during the gap.

            Solutions:

a. Business owners and social media managers should use multiple tools like Quora, ask questions, answer the public, Google Trends, etc. to find content daily. People ask their queries on these networks regularly and content creators also reply to them.

8. Engagement or Reach

In this era of competitors, businesses don’t engage and reach out to their target audience easily. They have to spend a lot of money on ads, teams, and tools. But most of the time they fail to engage their target audience after expending all of them.

            Solutions:

a. Businesses should invest in data-driven tools to target the right audience where they can get engagement.

b. Increase the posting frequency on social media platforms.

c. Know your audience or make it related to your business audience.

9. Finding social talent

Every social media expert, manager, and agency shows themselves as an expert but many of them are fake or inexperienced. They can’t engage traffic for the business. In the outcome, businesses waste their time and budget on them and their competitors leave them behind.

 Many businesses failed due to inexperienced marketing companies. Finding talent in the busy world is the largest challenge that most businesses face regularly.

            Solutions:

a. Check the portfolio before hiring an expert for a company for social media marketing.

b. Understand the clear job description and responsibilities before hiring.

c. Accountable social media experts when hiring.

10. Dealing With Fake Accounts/ Trolls

On every social media are a lot of fake accounts, that order products online but refuse to get them on arrival, which wastes the time and, money of businesses. Fake accounts also blackmail businesses with negative comments and ratings and demand extortion.

Many fake accounts also don’t do any activity on social media but the tools show them a business audience, which also leaves a bad impact on the businesses.

            Solutions:

a. Many tools are available that can delete or unsubscribe fake or inactive accounts.

b. Complain as soon as possible to the social media complaints center and other relevant law enforcement agencies against any violent activity on social media networks.

11. Exploring Partnerships And Promotions

Like social media managers, most of the influencers also claim to have the best engagement on their content. These influencers charge a high amount for promotion and sponsor products and businesses. But in reality, they have a fake or inactive audience.

The outcome is that businesses waste their time and money on it. Exploring the best influencers is also a challenge businesses face.

            Solutions:

a. Before partnering with promoters and influencers, check their portfolio and engagement rate with different tools.

b. Take data about their relevancy and claims from their previous partners.

12. Maintaining Originality

Nowadays, most businesses and influencers appoint AI bots for commenting, creating content, replying to queries, etc. on their social media platforms. Audiences don’t trust and are satisfied with bots, they want originality and a human touch. Audiences also doubt the business of bots instead of the original.

  Solutions:

a. Reply to every query on social media networks with data, portfolio, and experience.

b. Ask questions or contact your audience in different ways.

c. Publish proof of humanity-created content on your social media accounts with the help of tools.

Conclusion

Every challenge has solutions but to find the solutions you have to research, study, survey and experience. You can find solutions easily if you have decision-making, leadership, and other soft skills.

There are so many other challenges are also exist that businesses face when using social media but I mentioned only those challenges that are common for every business.