12.2. Grasping the Pros and Cons of Social Media Marketing
Both the pros and cons of social media marketing derive from the same source: the fact that people are going to talk about you. If they are saying good things about you and your products and services, that's a benefit; however, the potential drawback is that people are going to criticize you.
You can clearly see the effect of social media marketing by visiting Amazon.com and looking up a few books. Amazon encourages its customers to post reviews of books and other items sold on Amazon. According to Amazon, books that have plenty of positive reviews generally sell about 10 percent better than books that do not have any reviews. People buy the book, read it, and post a positive review, which convinces more people to buy the book, read it, and post positive reviews. Soon, the book and its readership gain so much momentum that you no longer have to sell the book—it sells itself or, more accurately, the community of book readers that formed around the book sell it for you.
On the other hand, one or two negative reviews can sink the sales of a book. Nobody's buying it, reading it, or talking about it, so sales of the book never take off.
You can witness the same phenomenon with other social media web sites where consumers share their opinions about products and services. For example, people can go on the web site TripAdvisor (www.tripadvisor.com) and post reviews and ratings for restaurants, hotels and motels, nightclubs, and ...
