Introduction

When it comes to marketing it can be difficult to decide where to focus your time and money. Most people dive right into social media because that's what everyone's doing so it must be the best option.

Not necessarily.

We've taken a look at the pros and cons of social media marketing and SMS marketing to give you a more informed idea about which marketing strategy is best for you.

Investment and ROI

The truth is, social media is hard. It's hard to get going when you're new to the various platforms and can take quite some time to build your following.

Social media isn't an instant marketing tool; you have to invest a lot of your time for it to show any results. And once you're up and running you have to constantly monitor your accounts to make sure you're engaging with your followers and keeping the conversation going.

If you compare this to text message marketing, where the investment of your time is incredibly low - it doesn't take long to type a text and click 'send' - you can see why you're going to get a better return on investment.

Yes, you have to pay to launch a business SMS campaign so could argue it's slightly more expensive than a 'free' social media strategy, but this argument soon goes out of the window when you work out your hourly rate and put a monetary value on the time spent on social media.

Engagement

Around 93% of UK adults own a mobile phone, and with 98% of text messages being read within 3 minutes of receiving them you can see why SMS marketing is such an effective tool. You have someone's undivided attention while they read your text, which isn't something you get with social media.

A Facebook post has an average reach of roughly 2-3% and a very low number of readers actually engage with the post (unlike when they're reading a text). Twitter has 313 million active users but is so fast moving that many tweets aren't actually read.

Access to the market

If you think about why people use social media you start to see it's downfall as an effective marketing strategy for businesses. The clue is in the name - social - media. People access their accounts to connect with friends, catch up on the latest news and share the latest funny video that's doing the rounds.

They're not there to buy something from you which is why it takes a mammoth amount of effort to get someone to make a purchase on social media. Some businesses do quite well at this, but it's only after the long struggle of getting people to notice their page, providing content that's engaging enough to get people to like or follow them and hoping their latest post is noticed amongst everything else in someone's feed.

You don't have this struggle with text message marketing. As most adults own a mobile phone you can be confident that your text will be delivered and read by your intended audience.

Plus, you already know that people want to be contacted by you because they've previously opted into receiving your business SMS and are therefore willing and ready to buy. If not you need to read this: How to Increase Your SMS Marketing Opt In Rates.