We have all grown up with the radio, television, and newspaper. This is what you recognize as traditional media. When it comes to social media we recognize Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube. Nowadays when you look at a TV commercial you don’t take it at face value and go out to buy it, you do your own research online like checking customer reviews on the product and compare all sides.
Traditional media provides value by giving subsidized content like free radio and TV programs and chances to win prizes. This means that advertisers can interrupt your day with their commercials advertising their products. However, with social media platforms are free so you don’t have to pay anything to advertise and no one will interrupt you with any commercials.
Social media is not only used to keep in touch with your family and friends, but brands also use it to effectively interact with their audience. Social media is a necessary tool when it comes to marketing. Social media differs from traditional media in many different ways. There are distinct differences that are worth looking at.
 

Differences between social media and traditional media

1. Cost

Placing an advert in the newspapers, television, or radio will cost you a small fortune. Social media is far less expensive and you get to reach the target audience that you want. Social media sites are free and you can post your content at any time without having to count the number of words is in the advert like in traditional media where you pay for every word.
 

2. Reach and numbers

Individual newspapers or radio and TV channels are limited to the number of people they can reach that read or view them. As for social media, you can use it to reach millions of users with just one post, video, or photo on the various social platforms.
 

3. Trust

 
When you use social media marketing, you use the content that you post on your page to cultivate trust with your audience over time. Your potential customer is able to know more about your product before he or she decides to buy. A customer is more likely to trust the opinions and views of other customers other than the owner of the product.
You get the chance to develop relationships with your customers and reward their loyalty by giving discounts, freebies, etc. Facebook has discounts and freebies it gives to its users as a reward and Instagram can come up with monthly or yearly discounts like contact igautolike for 50 auto like for Instagram free that will boost your Instagram followers. However, traditional marketing forces its opinion on the customer hoping that with repeated ads the customer will buy the product.
 

4. Feedback

You can’t give your opinion or reaction to an ad in the newspaper or television. All traditional media is one way. With social media, it’s two-way traffic. Your customers can comment on your products, raise their concerns, or give their recommendations. You can use social media to know how to meet the needs of your target audience better. Any content you post, your family and friends can comment on it, share it, and like it.
 

5. Flexibility

There is a level of flexibility in social media that you can’t get with traditional media. Once an article is published in the newspaper it can’t be corrected or re-edited. The only thing that can be done is to publish a retraction in the next issue. With social media, you can edit and re-edit any content you want depending on the situation.
 

6. Purpose

 
Traditional media focuses on giving you news. Its main purpose is to gather news and publish it so that readers are kept in touch with current affairs. On the other hand, social media is not only a place where you can interact with your family and friends, business owners can engage with their customers, and you can also get news and other social updates.
 

7. Accuracy

Any content that you read, watch, or listen to on traditional media doesn’t have a specific people it’s targeting, just anyone that will get the message. With social media, you can be very specific to the customers you want to by using their age, gender, income, demographic, etc. This will make sure that your content is seen by the tight people.
 

8. Real-time marketing

In traditional media, it can take months preparing for an ad campaign. From creating the message, shooting the ad, editing the images, planning on media spending, etc. In this digital era, there is no time for all that. You need to come up with fresh, creative, and interesting content constantly. Instead of having people in different departments from art to music to post-production, you need people who are multi-skilled for your ad campaign. Which means your content creators should not only be able to write they should know how to edit existing or craft images using different tools to make the content look awesome online.
 

9. Analytics

 
With traditional media, you have no way of knowing how successful your campaigns are because there are no tools to track your performance. With digital media you have tools you can use that will give you detailed data on each campaign to show you how many likes and shares the ad got, how many media users visited the ad, deep customer insight according to demographics, geographic, and psychographic, number of conversions, competitor analysis, etc.
 

10. Community

Social networks are drawing people and convincing them to spend more time engaging with other people on social media. By joining different groups on social media you become part of a community that shares interesting things like videos, photos, and useful content, ask questions, get support when needed, etc. Traditional media only creates an audience who will only get the information with no way of contributing or reacting to the discussion. In a community, there is constant improvement and involvement.
 

Final thoughts

Although traditional media has its own perks, in this digital era social media is more effective when it comes to your business.