For this weeks blog, I want to help you avoid making some of the most crucial Social Media Mistakes when it comes to marketing your business online.
1. Hard Selling on Social Media
With the way online marketing has changed, the way businesses advertise also has to change. The hard selling “buy this now” through social media will no longer work. Unless you show an interest in what your customers want, your customers won’t buy.
2. Creating Social Media Accounts for fun
One of the biggest social media myths is that you need to have an active social media account on every single social platform and that isn’t the case. You need to do your research and find out where your customers “hang out” and only target those networks and make sure you stay consistent with your brand across these networks.
3. Uneducated use of Social Media
Using social media without a social media strategy or any direction will not work for your business. You need to have a plan when it comes to marketing your business on social media and you do need to know the basics otherwise you will be missing out on potential customers. If you need help with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or Pinterest, you can check out our eLearning Courses here.
4. Quantity is NOT better than Quality
Another mistakes businesses make is thinking that having thousands of twitter followers or Facebook page likes is going to help their business but this isn’t always the case. Quality will always be better than quantity when it comes to social media. 10 engaging, purchasing followers is better than 1,000 that just follow you without any interaction.
5. Hashtag Overload
Hashtagging. You should be using no more than two hashtags per Tweet or Facebook post. Having too many hashtags in one post will make it look messy and overworked. To give you a real life, hilarious example of Hashtag overload, check out this video from Justin Timberlake and Jimmy Fallon.
6. Non-Stop Tweeting
Just like using too many hashtags, tweeting too much will hurt your brand reputation online. The biggest reason why businesses lose followers or Facebook likes is because they overpopulate their community’s Twitter stream or Facebook feed.
7. Not Having a Plan
Just like I mentioned above about having a social media strategy, without this you will find it difficult to keep consistency. You need to know month by month what events you have coming up around your business so that you know when to promote them.
8. Failure to Analyse
As mentioned in point 3, failure to analyse social media activity will stop you from understanding what works and what doesn’t. You need to make sure you are doing your market research on your customers, competition and what people are saying about your business as well as knowing what works for your social media community.
What social media mistakes did you make in 2013 that you are going to avoid in 2014.
By Warren Knight
