Gone are the days of convincing business owners that social media marketing is a good option for them—it’s a given. Your business should have a presence online, but being on social media won’t do your business any good if you’re not doing it right.
Here’s some common rookie mistakes to avoid with your company’s social media presence:
- Making it about you: social media is meant to be…social! Social media marketing is all about engaging with your audience, not promoting yourself or your business all the time. Getting the word out about an offer is great once in a while, but nurturing your online relationships is far more important and beneficial. An easy way to decipher content choices is to simply ask yourself “would I want to see this on my own news feed?”, or “would my audience find this interesting or engaging?”
- Trying to do it all: it’s a common myth that you need to be on every social media platform to see the return. You are far better off picking the sites that make sense for your target demographic, and master your presence there. Sites like Pinterest and Houzz can be great for certain industries, and make no sense at all for others. Figure out where your customers are online, and go there. Secondly to this point, don’t expect yourself to be able to master every effort of your company.
- Duplicating messages: While it may seem like a time-saver, copying and pasting the same message across multiple platforms is just doing you damage. For one, your audience will notice, and secondly, the language is different on every social media site and you need to format accordingly. You can share the same message, but you need to be aware of rewriting it for each place it’s sent.
- Tracking the wrong metrics: while it may give you an ego boost, the number of followers you have is not the most important metric to be tracking with your social media efforts. The number of visitors your social media pages are driving to your website, is far more important to your bottom line. Pay attention to referrals and engagement, not the overall picture. Large followings mean nothing if nobody is engaging with you or your content online.
- Misusing hashtags: it seems to be a pretty big misconception that hashtags are simply for humour, but they add real value to your content if you use them correctly. Do some research on what local hashtags reflect the demographic you are targeting, and hashtag accordingly. If you are targeting locally for a service, things like #checkthis or #greatarticle aren’t really search terms that people in your city will be searching.
- Poor grammar and spelling: always, always edit before you post. Your audience is always watching, and the smallest error online can quickly turn into a firestorm of backlash. Every week a brand is making headlines for posting an embarrassing mistake that went viral. Not all publicity is good publicity, don’t let your spelling ruin your reputation.
- Buying followings, not earning them: perception is not more important than reality when it comes to the ROI of your social media marketing, meaning that having a lot of paid followers is doing nothing for your business. Focus on your social media efforts, and you can earn followers that will actually benefit your business. Those paid followers will never convert into customers, they will never engage in your content. And there’s even several sites dedicated to proving the amount of fake followers brands have, and that would be very embarrassing to have your clients find that out about your brand.
If you don’t have the expertise to handle your own social media correctly (or can’t afford to hire in-house), consider outsourcing the work to an expert. If you’re interested in taking your social media presence to the next level, please contact us.
This post was originally published by Bamboo Creative. It has been reposted with permission.