Social media can be an incredible tool to utilize for your business, but if it’s not implemented and managed correctly, it can actually damage your business. Here are 5 mistakes you can’t afford to make:
1. Not Having A Social Media Strategy
Actually, if you have a strong, well thought out and thorough social media strategy, you shouldn’t be making any of the mistakes on this page as the strategy should take care of it for you. Even so, a lot of businesses make these mistakes while thinking they have a social media strategy, so let’s take a look at both what the social media strategy should include and what the mistakes you need to avoid are.
Your social media strategy should include:
- What the goal of the social media efforts should be. This should include something which is measurable, like acquiring 100 people to subscribe to your email list through learning about it on social media.
- On what platforms you should be on. This requires you to find out which platforms your target audience are on.
- What type of content you will be sharing and with what voice. To know what to share you need to understand what your audience are into and what your goal is. This should be specific to each platform.
- How often and at what times you should be posting on social media. This should also be specific to each platform.
- How to deal with engagements like comments and questions, both positive and negative.
2. Creating Accounts On Too Many Platforms Or Too Soon
First of all, as the strategy says you should, you need to find out which platforms your target audience are using the most because being active on platforms your target audience are not using is, of course, a waste of time. If they are on several platforms, pick one or two and start with that. Create solid strategies specific to for instance Facebook and Twitter and make sure you can do a great job there before looking to go elsewhere.
3. Selling Too Much Or Too Little
Make sure you don’t only talk about your brand in social media. Find out what your audience likes and cares about and share content about that. You want your audience to see your content as valuable and not just as you trying to sell them something.
On the other hand, your goal behind a social media presence shouldn’t just be to get as many likes as possible. Having a large audience doesn’t mean much if you can’t convert them. Make sure you have calls-to-actions that guide the audience off of social media and on to either a landing page, subscribing to a newsletter where you have another chance to convert further, to your website, maybe your blog, etc.
4. Sharing Too Much Or Too Little – Or At The Wrong Time
You need to make sure your account is active, but you don’t want to spam your audience either. Finding the right amount of posts per day can be tricky. There are many theories out there, but one place to start is to look at what your competition is doing. If you see your competition doing well, you can have them as a reference to start with.
Even if you find the perfect number of times to share content, if you share it at the wrong time of day you might not be reaching any of your target audience. To find out when your audience is on, there are several tools you can use. One tool I’ll mention which is free and contains a lot of useful information is SocialRivals.com. This tool is specific for Twitter and it lets you compare your twitter account with your competitors.
5. Not Being Social On Social Media
Your audience wants to feel like there are real people behind each social media account. Make sure you use an appropriate voice, speak more like your customers do and leave the corporate voice behind. Also, make sure you are actually engaging with the audience. Acknowledge their engagement, like for instance replying to comments. Make sure the person responsible for this knows how the brand wants to engage with its customers.
If done correctly, your social media presence can help your business grow and thrive. It’s another opportunity to communicate with your customers in a way they like to be communicated with and in a place where they spend a lot of time. Make use of that opportunity, but make sure you don’t make those 5 crucial mistakes.