Email Marketing > Social Media Marketing.. Here’s Why

We all love social media right? The common answer is yes, except for the trolls.

While social media is great for reaching out to those interested in your brand, finding new potential customers, and quickly interacting with your followers — there are definite limitations. Whether you are using Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, or Instagram your brand will not flourish just by posting on them and ignoring traditional email marketing.

The best use of your social media strategy is to direct your social audience to your email list. This piece will break it down for you.

Every brand has a both a Facebook and Twitter page, so let’s talk about these two channels. Let’s take Facebook as our first example and understand the two large problems that exist with the platform.

The first being the constant algorithm changes implemented by Facebook. The result of these changes has left it where there is a high probability that users who like your page may rarely see your posts within their feed. There was once a time, where a user could like your page, and then they could see all of your posts in their news feed. The changes now result in that user seeing them based on what is most relevant to them based on their engagement. This is problematic as a good number of those that like your page may miss out on your latest content.

This effectively makes using Facebook to promote an upstart brand extremely difficult and not worth you exhausting resources to have an elite Facebook game — there’s better uses of your time!

The second issue is the impersonal nature of marketing on Facebook, especially when the platform is full of affiliate marketing pyramid schemes which post the same poorly worded marketing ploys to convince only the gullible into checking out a link.

This lack of personalization makes marketing hard for brands to do things catered specifically for their audiences, unless you are paying for it. Unfortunately for many, Facebook has become very much a one post fits all approach.

Twitter is not exempt from having limitations as well.

There is a similar limitation when it comes to lack of personalization (again, unless you are paying for personalized targeting on their platform), but the biggest limitation is that you only have 140 characters to share your brand’s message. Sure, you can develop some gimmicks to help develop brand recognition, however when it comes to converting that attention into paying customers Twitter will not help much.

Oh and Twitter also has an annoying troll problem. The low level of discourse allowed on the platform could lead to a number of distractions.

So why is email marketing better than social media marketing?

1) Remember that issue with personalization? That doesn’t exist with email. While it would cost you to personalize on Twitter or Facebook, this is not an issue with email.

2) Limitations? Word counts? No such thing in email. You get the ability to produce and share a broader message in this format than you would with your social platforms.

3) Want to reach your entire audience? No problem. Email doesn’t have the same issue of annoying algorithms interfering with your message being seen by those that want to see it.

4) Analyze your performance. Email is great as you can gain instant feedback on your efforts and make continuous improvements. This feature is made extra simple and detailed on the Maropost Marketing Cloud platform.

Again, I’m not stating your brand will not benefit from a social media presence — just that your social media strategy needs to be on that encourages individuals to become leads for your email list, as that is your direct path to increasing your profits.

Originally published at blog.maropost.com.