Despite its fast growth and importance in marketing, social media is still quite underestimated and misunderstood. Many have misconceptions about the results they can expect from it and underrate what it takes to create and execute a successful social media strategy.

Here are five truths that will help you understand the role and true potential of social media marketing and enable you to effectively use it as a marketing tool for your brand.

1. There’s no overnight success

It’s a misguided, but common misconception that your social media presence will automatically translate into followers and sales. This leads business owners to frustration when their account is slow to grow and the sales are not flowing. 

The truth is, supporting your business goals with social media takes time, strategy and budget. There are factors such as branding, sales cycles, seasonality, and others to also take into account when considering a business’s performance on social media. 

The bottomline is that you have to understand that success takes commitment, consistency and adaptation when leveraging social media to drive business results.

2. It’s not a sales platform

Organic social media is where brands are built, not where sales are made. Yes, sales will result from your social media presence, but they are not guaranteed to happen right away. Your social media presence is a tool to build brand awareness, attract an ideal audience by communicating brand values, create connection and relationships, and ultimately build brand affinity. While sales can and will happen during any point throughout that journey, they are not guaranteed and should not be the main focus of your social media strategy. 

3. It is not free

While sharing content to social media platforms is free, the strategy and content required to successfully reach and attract your ideal audience is not free. It’s actually quite an investment.

It isn’t just the dollars spent you should take into consideration, it is also the time that goes into strategizing, content creation, community management, brand outreach, metrics reporting. This is also assuming you’re not incorporating paid strategies into the mix.

Your social media presence should be budgeted for competitively if you wish to have success from it. Investing in the right employee(s) or agency partner will ensure your social media presence is representative of your brand and its performance will create a ripple effect that will boost important key performance indicators across all your marketing efforts.

4. It’s not going anywhere

The role of social media in marketing continues to grow and it isn’t going away.

It is no longer an option to dismiss having a social media presence because you can’t see a tangible ROI. If your business can’t be found on any social media platform, not only is it losing out on potentially reaching millions of people, it is also risking not being seen as legitimate. 

Social media is an important line of communication between a brand and its audience and one you can’t afford to ignore. It is also oftentimes the first touch point of your brand that a potential client experiences and not having a strong presence can be the difference between gaining or losing a sale.

5. You’re wasting time and resources without a strategy

The misconception that social media guarantees quick returns and is not an investment leads many business owners to jump on social media without a strategy. They often do it themselves when they find free time or hand it off to any staff member willing to take it on. This is detrimental to your brand and your business’s bottom line.

Without a solid content strategy, your brand may not be well represented and anyone discovering it on your accounts as a first point of contact may be put off. Creating content requires both time and budget, without a strategy you will find yourself constantly unable to see results while expending resources.