The benefits of building a community within a platform like Facebook or using Facebook connect allows more complex features, scalable and as it typically more cost effective.

Sometimes i think more focus should be around building trust and developing your brand not build a new community platform from scratch.

The time investment in social media is a big factor because results aren’t necessarily immediate. It takes time to build a community, generate trust and develop a brand.

While social media can be cheap compared to other medium such as Television or even AdWords campaigns it does have its limits as to what can be done in the allocated time.

Spending 5 hours a week may sound like a lot to a client who is paying an agency to run the campaign but the likely campaign success will struggle if their competitors are spending 5 hours a day or the audience demands instant gratification or response such as in customer service channels.

If you using social media as a customer service channel to assist with stranded passengers a auto-generate response with some basic intelligence using keyword analysis while possible is not always the best idea.

The ease that a consumer can quickly ReTweet a poorly generated auto-response will just likely compound the problem and lead to more focus on the issue. So doing social media on the cheap can hurt the brand and if they are not serious they should not move into social media otherwise they can further damage their digital brand.