📊 Social Media – Necessary, but Not Sufficient for Success
🔹Strategic Importance of Social Media for Your Business
Although social media is not sufficient on its own, its importance in modern business remains unquestionable. Social media is a powerful tool for strengthening brand awareness, establishing direct communication with clients, building trust relationships, and creating a community of loyal followers. They allow you to tell your business story in a creative, direct, and authentic way.
However, the mistake many make is attempting to be present on all possible social networks, which leads to a waste of time, energy, and money. Your strategy must be clear: you don’t have to be present everywhere, but where your audience is and where you will achieve the greatest effect. Quality is always more important than quantity, which is why the strategic choice of social media is crucial.
Brief History and Characteristics:
Facebook, founded in 2004, is still the largest and most widespread social network in the world with over 3 billion active monthly users. It is known for its wide demographic spectrum of users, making it ideal for almost any business.
How to Use for Business Purposes:
Facebook is great for targeted advertising (Facebook Ads), creating communities through Facebook groups, organizing events, sharing quality content (blogs, video materials), and achieving direct interaction via Messenger.
Specific Tips:
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Create clear, visually appealing posts.
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Use Facebook Live for interactive sessions and Q&A.
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Actively use groups for community development and added value for clients.
Brief History and Characteristics:
Instagram was launched in 2010 as a visual social network focused on photos and video. Today it has over 2 billion active monthly users, is especially popular among younger generations, and is highly suitable for brands that rely on aesthetics and visual storytelling.
How to Use for Business Purposes:
Instagram is ideal for visually attractive posts, creating “Stories” and Reels, which allows for excellent visibility and virality of content.
Specific Tips:
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Create a consistent and recognizable visual identity.
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Use Stories and Reels for “behind-the-scenes” content display.
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Engage in influencer marketing for added reach and credibility.
🔹X (formerly Twitter)
Brief History and Characteristics:
Launched in 2006 as Twitter, now known as X, the platform is for short, fast, and direct posts. It is best known for real-time current information, short formats, and interactive communication with the audience.
How to Use for Business Purposes:
X is ideal for sharing news, promoting updates, monitoring trends, and direct communication with clients, partners, and the media.
Specific Tips:
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Be active in conversations relevant to your industry.
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Regularly follow trends and use relevant hashtags.
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Provide quick and clear answers to client questions in real-time.
Brief History and Characteristics:
LinkedIn was founded in 2003 as a business and professional network. Today it gathers over 950 million users worldwide, predominantly professionals, managers, and business people.
How to Use for Business Purposes:
LinkedIn is a key network for B2B marketing, strengthening professional authority, creating business opportunities, recruiting, and networking with other professionals.
Specific Tips:
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Publish valuable, expert, and educational content.
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Actively participate in discussions within relevant groups.
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Build a network through regular connection and quality communication with colleagues and potential clients.
🔹TikTok
Brief History and Characteristics:
TikTok, launched in 2016, quickly conquered younger generations and currently has over 1.5 billion active monthly users. The platform is based on short video clips with strong viral potential.
How to Use for Business Purposes:
TikTok is excellent for raising brand awareness, creatively presenting products or services, attracting a younger audience, and generating viral content.
Specific Tips:
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Create authentic, entertaining, and creative video content.
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Participate in popular challenges and trends.
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Collaborate with TikTok influencers to increase your brand’s reach and credibility.
Finally, the key to success on social media in 2025 is not presence on all platforms, but a strategic approach: be where your customers are, where your content has the greatest effect, and where you can clearly measure the results of your engagement.
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🔹 Consequences of Unprofessional Social Media Management for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs)
Small and medium-sized enterprises often manage their social media profiles themselves, but a lack of expertise and strategy can be costly.
As many as 73% of small business owners are dissatisfied with the effects of their marketing, and social media is a particular challenge: 44% state that posting on social platforms takes up too much time and is a problem.
Below are the key consequences of unprofessional social media management for SMEs, supported by the latest statistics:
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Loss of Sales and Opportunities: Poorly managed profiles can lead to missed sales opportunities. Research shows that 77% of consumers prefer to buy from brands they follow on social media. If a company does not build a quality presence and follower base, potential buyers will find it harder to trust the brand and will be less likely to decide to purchase. Also, 74% of people become more loyal to a brand after regular interaction with its online content – which means that poor or irregular content misses the chance to create loyal customers and repeat sales.
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Weak engagement and Audience Reach: Without an expert approach, posts often do not reach a wider audience or provoke reactions. The organic algorithm limits content visibility – the median engagement rate on Facebook is barely 0.06% (only ~6 reactions per 10,000 followers on average). The situation is not much better on Instagram, with an average engagement rate of ~0.4%. With such low averages, unprofessionally managed pages often have an even smaller response: few likes, comments, and shares. Low engagement signals weak audience involvement, which further algorithmically reduces future organic reach – creating a vicious cycle of invisibility. The result is social media campaigns that waste time and resources without generating the expected return or new inquiries.
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Inconsistent Branding and Image: An uncoordinated tone of communication, visual style, and messages that are not aligned with the brand can confuse or repel users. As many as 71% of companies believe that inconsistent brand presentation (e.g., a different style on different networks) leads to customer confusion. This is a frequent risk when social media is managed by an unskilled person – e.g., if content is posted ad-hoc, without defined brand guidelines. The consequences can be a weakened brand identity and less audience trust. Studies show that consistent brand appearance can increase revenue by up to 23%, which shows how much aligned branding directly impacts results. Companies that neglect this potentially leave that money on the table.
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Negative Impact on Reputation and ROI: Mistakes in communication or poor interaction with followers can damage a company’s reputation. For example, ignoring complaints or inappropriate responses to comments create a bad impression that spreads quickly. A huge 78% of consumers – and as many as 88% of Generation Z – state that a brand’s presence on social media increasingly influences their trust in that brand. This means that a neglected profile (rare or unprofessional posts) or one viral “mistake” can seriously damage the perception of a company’s quality and reliability. Finally, unprofessional social media management also affects the ROI itself – investments do not pay off. Without a strategy, social media can yield poor or negative returns; it has been noted that many marketing leaders reduce investment in social media precisely because of “poor results and unclear contribution to sales”. In other words, if social media is managed amateurishly, the ROI of that channel will be low, and the SME’s overall marketing budget could be used more effectively elsewhere.
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🔹 Advantages of Email Marketing vs. Challenges of Social Media
Email marketing continues to show an extremely high **Return on Investment (ROI)** in 2024/25. Research confirms that the average ROI of email campaigns is around 3600–4200%, or approximately $36–$42 return for every $1 invested.
Many companies achieve an even higher return – almost 1 in 5 firms achieve an ROI of 7000% or more (over $70 per $1).
In the e-commerce sector, the ROI is particularly impressive (average around $38 per $1 invested) and significantly surpasses the ROI of social media and paid advertising.
The high ROI of email marketing is attributed to low costs (no payment for advertising space per impression), the possibility of automation and personalization of messages, as well as direct communication with the subscriber base.
Audience engagement via email also records good results. According to an analysis of over 4 billion emails from 2023, the average email open rate was about 40%, while the click-through rate (CTR) was 3.2%. (Note: the increased open rates are partly due to newer privacy changes that automatically log opens on Apple devices, but the rising CTR trend also suggests higher-quality content).
For comparative context, the average click-to-open rate from email campaigns to websites ranges around 8–13%, confirming that well-segmented and personalized emails successfully encourage reader action.
Additionally, over half of consumers (52%) state that they immediately made a purchase based on an email message they received from a brand – significantly more than via social media.
The advantages of email over social media and paid ads are particularly pronounced in terms of ROI. While email marketing yields dozens of dollars per dollar invested, paid search ads on average return only about $2 per $1 (ROI ~200%).
ROI on social media is even lower – measuring performance on social platforms is challenging for half of marketers, and investments often do not pay off in sales as much as in brand visibility.
A survey shows that as many as 41% of marketing experts rate email as the most effective channel, compared to only ~16% who consider social media or paid search most effective.
Simply put, email marketing outperforms social media in conversions and return – at a significantly lower cost per contact.
This does not mean other channels should be neglected, but that email provides the best ROI as the foundation of a digital strategy, with social media and ads as supplements for building brand awareness.
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🔹 Website + Email marketing + Social Media = Successful Online Business
Email marketing stands out in 2024/25 as the channel with the best average ROI and strong user engagement, surpassing other digital channels in delivering concrete results. On the other hand, a presence on social media is important for brand visibility and communication, but for small and medium-sized enterprises, it can become a double-edged sword if managed unprofessionally.
Statistics show that a well-designed strategy and expertise in managing social profiles directly impact success – they increase engagement, build audience trust, and contribute positively to sales.
Conversely, an amateur approach leads to a weak response, loss of potential customers, and a negative ROI, which no company wants.
Therefore, the recommendation for SMEs is to invest either in training their staff for digital marketing or hire professionals, in order to maximize the use of social media while continuing to capitalize on the proven high ROI of email marketing.
From a financial perspective, “saving” on an expert can backfire. Professional digital marketing agencies may seem more expensive at first glance, but statistics suggest the opposite when considering total costs and results.
Research suggests that hiring a specialized
🧭 Your business can create well-being – if you allow it to think more freely
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🔥 Nebojša @ Skenderovic Consultants
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