Use social media to promote, not hurt, your business.
Social media and small and medium sized businesses are a match made in heaven. With the right strategy in place, social media can help you connect with your target market to increase brand awareness, establish your credibility in the industry, and attract prospective customers, clients and business partners. It can also help you improve customer service and keep in touch with past and current customers. And since you can enjoy all of these benefits without putting a great strain on your budget, social media is definitely perfect for small businesses.
However, while most business owners know how important social media is, there are still a lot of people who commit some serious mistakes in setting up their social media strategy. Needless to say, these common pitfalls may jeopardize your efforts and cost you a lot of money. On top of it all, they may also reduce your chances of getting the results you need.
5 Social Media Mistakes to Avoid
Since most people learn from their mistakes as well as from the mistakes of other people, you need to know about the most common social media mistakes most business owners and marketers make to help ensure the success of your campaign. Here are some of them.
Buying fans and followers. Some business owners and digital marketers equate the number of fans and followers with success so they try to buy fake Facebook fans and Twitter followers instead. Unfortunately, this practice may only hurt your business in the long run since most social media platforms have algorithms that measure the engagement rate of your followers against the total number of your brand’s followers.
If you really want to increase your fan base, focus your energy on creating useful and relevant content for your audience instead. In time, this will give you the kind of results you need.
Sharing too much or too little. While posting infrequently can make your followers forget all about you, sharing one post after another within a short period of time may overwhelm your audience, and cause them to ignore your posts or unfollow you altogether. Avoid running into such problems by creating a regular posting schedule using online tools such as HootSuite and Buffer.
Being unresponsive. Failure to reply to tweets and comments can have dire consequences. You need to foster a deeper engagement with your audience if you want to get positive results from your efforts.
Not using visuals. Studies indicate that including photos in your tweets can help you generate 35% more retweets while including videos can increase your retweet rate by 28%.
Making it all about you. Talking about your business without listening to your audience would be counterproductive. Engage with your audience by joining the conversation and make sure you respond to all of their questions.
Remember, social media can help you achieve your business goals, but only if you strategize.
