In today’s digital environment, having a social media presence is crucial. Avoid These 6 Social Media Mistakes.
No less than 99% of the world’s top brands are on social media, while an estimated 8 out of 10 small businesses take advantage of the medium’s marketing possibilities.
Done correctly, social media offers the ability to spread awareness of your brand and gain new customers even on a small budget.
But approach it wrong, and you may find yourself in the middle of a social media nightmare.
Here are 6 social media mistakes to avoid to make sure your social media helps you succeed.
1) No Strategy
Simply setting up an account and posting whenever you have some time will likely not get you far. Instead, you should begin your efforts by setting up a strategy that specifies your target audience, your distinct online voice, and measurable goals you’re trying to accomplish. A good social media strategy will be the foundation of avoiding many of the below mistakes.
2) Wrong or Too Many Platforms
Many small businesses make the mistake of setting up an account on the network with which they are most familiar. But in reality, your presence should be where your customers spend their time. To make sure that’s the case, you may want to set up presences on as many platforms as possible.
Doing so means you will struggle to generate enough quality content for each platform, leading to abandoned accounts that reflect badly on your business. Instead, pick a platform or two that matches up with your target audience, and stick to it.
3) Paying for Fake Followers
How to you judge the success of your social media presence? The answer is not, as you might think, the amount of followers you generate on your platform(s) of choice. If none of those followers ever engage with your posts or visit your website, your business will gain little.
That’s why paying for fake followers, or even running untargeted ‘like’ campaigns, will do little for your social media success. Instead, you should seek to increase your follower base through quality content and targeted ads, which greatly increases your chance of getting followers who actually have a chance of engaging and becoming customers.
4) The Disease of Me
Social media is unlike any other type of marketing in that your followers will expect your content to not be about you. An easy trap to fall into is posting content that promotes your brand but in reality, this type of content will generate little engagement and probably won’t lead to many new customers.
Instead, the key to success in social media is in its name: you should try to entice your customers with content that is relevant and helpful to them, building a community that engages with your posts and trusts your brand.
5) Trying Too Hard
Especially inexperienced social media marketers sometimes try to overcompensate by trying to hard: hash tags are ‘cool,’ so we have to incorporate them in as many of our messages as we can! In reality, your social media-savvy audience will see right through those efforts.
Instead, limit your hash tag usage to a few, relevant phrases, instead focusing on the distinct brand voice you created in the strategy above. Coming across as authentic and honest will be much more successful than simply trying to be cool on social media.
6) Quantity over Quality
But even being authentic and honest will have little effect if your individual posts aren’t qualitatively good. Make sure you proofread your messages before posting, and avoid publishing content just for the sake of publishing – posting too often can actually hurt your reputation and position you as annoying in your audience’s mind.
Engaging content should be your #1 priority in social media marketing. But your content can only be engaging if it’s without spelling errors, high-quality, and seeks to be helpful and relevant to your audience rather than simply pushing a sales message over and over again.
To learn more about using social media in a way that helps your business prosper, contact us!
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