Strengths and Weaknesses of e-tools

Strengths:

·         Facebook - Business pages are the official way for companies to get

their message across on Facebook, with status updates, images, and 3rd

party apps such as ‘fan of the month’ used to drive engagement. Facebook is one of the best social media forms of marketing as it has over 1 billion active users and businesses have direct contact with their audiences. Businesses and consumers feel as if they are on a level playing field.

·         YouTube – Anything that goes on YouTube has the ability to go viral, due to their being millions of visitors a day. YouTube provides a platform for marketers to reach a huge audience. YouTube has become the second largest search engine with about 55% consumer traffic on the Internet in 2014. Another advantage of promoting videos on YouTube is a strong support by Google as YouTube is wholly owned by the popular search engine.

·         Twitter – Twitter is a good marketing medium as you can offer help and support. You can also monitor campaigns by the use of hashtags. You can see how many people use your hashtags and see all the tweets with your hashtag in them.

·         Instagram – Like Twitter, Instagram uses a hashtag system. This means businesses can monitor their campaigns by searching the hashtag. Instagram can be very effective to businesses that use visual marketing. For example can be very effective for hotels, restaurants and clothing brands. By showing consumers your beautiful hotel/restaurant or your stylish clothing range may encourage them to purchase from your business.

Weaknesses:

·         Facebook – Facebooks main con is that it is not a 9-5 resource for your customers. People use Facebook all hours of the day and night, without a thought for office hours. Businesses know they can’t be there 24/7, so they need to make this clear to their customers so that if they don’t receive a timely reply to their comments or messages they don’t assume the business is ignoring them.

·         YouTube - There is no guarantee of desired outcomes with YouTube marketing as viewers have the final say in supporting or rejecting the video content or business offer.  YouTube has certain restrictions on videos including copyrights on music. Due to YouTube being free, people often post both positive and negative reviews on products. This can be bad for businesses as negative reviews could ruin their reputation, damaging business success.

·         Twitter – Twitter also has its downfalls. Posts are limited to 140 characteristics, which can make it hard to properly describe something and to be informative. Also, Twitter’s fast paced nature can make reaching large audiences hard.

·         Instagram – The majority of Instagram users use it to follow friends on a personal level and do not want to see business advertisements on their Instagram feed therefore, may give businesses that use this medium a bad relationship with consumers. Instagram only have 300 million active monthly users as opposed to Facebooks 1.4 billion active monthly users. This makes Instagram a bad investment opportunity compared to Facebook in relation to marketing.