Is Social Media Marketing overrated?

Mark Ritson chose to critique social media’s affect on the future of marketing. (Ritson 2017) perspective is a unique one considering we’re living in the digital age where social media is pushed as the face of marketing and increasing brand awareness. Ritson claims that social media will make up just 2.5% of future marketing with marketers skill set being tarnished in the era of social media.

A recent report from the Experian found 66% of Australians don’t follow brands on social media (Ritson 2017). The use of this statistic draws questions over how effective the reach of social media actually has become. This brings up an interesting discussion as many brands have further increased funding for social media marketing.

In Fact advertising spend on social media in Australia has grown 12% in the last annual year reaching USD $4.26 billion, this number accounts for 29% of total digital ad expenditure. With Influencer marketing in particular making a 13% increase annually (Watson 2025). So there’s no doubt that businesses support the move towards digital marketing, however those like Professor Mark Ritson believes tactics such as research, segmentation and positioning are being looked over as he doesn’t see social media audiences as large representation of the market.

Limitations of Social Media marketing include:

Ad fatigue as consumers are constantly seeing different adverts on different social media platforms.

Dependence on platforms/algorithms as marketers will rely on platforms like TikTok, Meta and Google as the performance on ads can drastically change depending on policy changes or decisions.

Limited Reach is an issue more related to people living in rural areas or potentially older consumers who may still trust traditional media campaigns.

Limited Consumer Focus is an ongoing issue which is only made worse by pages like Reels, Shorts and TikTok which all have contributed to a shrunken attention span of social media users, which gives a smaller window for marketers to influence the potential consumer.

Now from a critical analytic view I see this discussion as a two sided debate with both sides having valid points. However i think as marketers we should aim to find a balance between grounding our work in strategic principles with social media being used a tool to further engagement and awareness but not relying solely on social media as a marketing tool. It should be a circumstance based decision where social media marketing is one of many tools a marketer can draw from to effectively match a brand goals.