Social media is the new path for all businesses in this modern era. However, making a progress there and promoting the business isn’t all that easy. Especially when a lot of business owners are found complaining that their social media pages and strategies didn’t return any good value.
If you have not been effective with your social media marketing, following are some good tips to start on the right foot. These are the mistakes you must avoid:
1. Selling Your Products And Services
Social networking websites require you to level with your customers and communicate with them in a friendly way rather than a patronising manner. You can’t apply the same sales pitches and strategies that you apply on your website or blog. Make sure you are promoting and not hard selling your products and services on social networking websites.
2. Doing It All At Once
Is it a good strategy to have your business pages on all social networking websites? It is only good when you have a good team to keep these pages managed. If you don’t have enough people taking care of your social networking marketing don’t make too many pages. There are high chances that you would end up updating only 1 or 2 of them and the rest will be inactive for most of the time. The problem here is that the inactive pages will have a negative effect on your business reputation.
3. It Is Still About Quality, Not Quantity
The abundance of information and data has led many people to believe that more is better. This is not true at all. Quality is just as important for anything today as it was in the past. If you think having many followers on Facebook, Google + or Twitter is all you need then you might want to rethink. Having quality followers is much more important than having just followers. Remember, you need people who interact with your business and are potential buyers too.
4. Excessive Reading
Is reading a good activity? Yes it is. Is it good to read all the time? No, it is not. You must remember that the more you read the more you bury yourself under the impression that everything has already been shared. You deem that people know everything but the truth is quite the contrary. Whatever good stuff you can share in relevance to your business should be shared without thinking how many people already know about it. Your job is to put quality stuff in front of your followers to keep them engaged. Even the product you are selling might be something that people have already seen in all the different places but would that stop you from selling it?
5. Not Being Creative At All
Yes, in the previous passage you have been told to share the stuff that has already been shared in good faith because your job is to bring quality stuff to your followers but should that stop you from being creative? Clichés don’t work all the time and when it comes to social media platforms you must be creative. If you look at the social media pages of the top brands you will find out that they are always coming up with unique ideas.
6. Being Slow Or Inactive
Internet is a place where something is happening all the time. You cannot afford to be inactive or less frequent with your updates. You have to update your pages as frequently as possible but remember to post only when you’re sure the content is interesting to your readers. Don’t go for too much automation as your social networking page is all about real people and automated responses or posts are on most occasions very annoying for these real people.
7. Not Responding To Customers And Followers
This is probably the biggest mistake that any business can make and if you don’t take care of it in 2021 your page might not live long enough to see 2015. On social networking platforms people expect you to respond to them in as personalised manner as possible and so you have to give them what they want. More than your website and blog, social networking pages prove to be great places for businesses to respond to queries and complaints posted by their customers.
8. Inferior And Misdirected Branding
Social media promotion is often about having your name recognised through effective branding. Have you created a business page on Facebook in blue and white whereas you have a page on Twitter in green and red? If you are in a similar or exactly the same situation, do something about it right now. While this might not push your customers away from your business or brand but it will not have a consistent image of your brand in their heads when they think of you.
9. Not Repeating The Posts
You will be told by many people that repeating your posts and tweets is not the best thing but this is not true. Are you sure that your first post was read by all of your readers? Are you under the impression that your readers are following and reading about you 24/7? The best thing to do is separate the repeated post or tweet by a pre-defined timeline and try new headings or titles for it. Even if you get 1000 clicks on first post and then 700 on second, you know you would have lost 700 additional clicks by not reposting the content.
10. Not Using The Great Features Of Social Media
There are different tools provided by every social networking website and you must know how to use them. Circles in Google+ must be utilized to make the most of them and same goes for banner photo feature that was recently introduced by LinkedIn. Instagram requires hashtags for you to recognize certain photos and images. The @ mention feature of Twitter must be used properly too. In a similar fashion, all the social networking websites have their own great features and they must be used fully to obtain the best results.