Social media has been in the forefront of a company’s marketing and promotional efforts. It has opened for them opportunities that has never been enjoyed by businesses in the last few decades—global promotion, level playing field, direct customer interaction, low-cost advertising, viral marketing, and other benefits.

However, with so many marketing solutions, there are still unsolved problems that are plaguing social media. Here are some of the toughest setbacks that social media still haven’t successfully addressed.

1. Contact List Overload

Even if you only have a few social networks that you are a member of, you have multiple lists of contacts to manage. Most of these networks let you import contacts from one service to the other. In addition, you can even do repeat imports to find friends who have just signed up for a service that you have used for some time.

Even if reaching out to a huge market is a theoretical ideal, the reality is that many of the entities in your contacts do not really care at all. In fact, there may even be some who might be annoyed of receiving your constant updates. Think of cold-selling; you are promoting your business to anyone, even to uninterested buyers or people who have clearly no need or no capacity to avail of your product, when supposedly, you should be targeting “hot” prospects.

In addition, the notion of “the more, the better” makes it difficult for you to keep your contacts organized and manageable.

2. Information overload

RSS feeds used to be a convenient way to aggregate streams of interesting, frequently updated content and information that we found online. However, this has resulted to a roaring river of feeds, e-mails, newsletters, texts, voice transcriptions, etc., that has flooded our inboxes. We are bombarded with information that we do not really need. It is funny—and frustrating—that we have countless tools for creating and finding content but only very few to help us thin out and manage the massive volume of information. Oh yes, managing information overload is an attention management problem, but a few technical tools would surely be a boon.

3. Brand overload

Social media has become one of the hottest things in Internet marketing, and big brands have joined the bandwagon to take advantage of opportunities for brand- and relationship-building. As more and more branded companies come in, the more the social networking feels like one big advertisement. Remember that social media is supposed to be all about interaction, and with proper interaction, marketing will follow. It is supposed to be about relationships that help establish credibility and harmonious relationships. Now, it is all about saturating the net with ads, ads, and more ads.

4. Apathy overload

Social media is perhaps the most influential medium today. However, it really does not address pressing problems such as environmental and social problems; ironic considering that many companies incorporate corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs in their organizations. Some businesses do try to experiment and attempt to use social media to crowdsource social and environmental solutions to catalyze positive change. However, we have yet to see any substantial evidence that social media will deliver that change. Looking, initializing, and utilizing compelling, scalable models for social and environmental change may be social networking toughest and most crucial challenge.

Why are these problems still unsolved? Well, most experts say cite the lack of strictly technical solutions. Design, strategy, and analysis will all be essential to find answers to the problems stated above.