As we all know, social media is an extremely powerful form of marketing that can positively impact your business and contribute to its success. However, social media marketing is essentially a full-time job that requires a lot of attention to detail accompanied by a complete strategy.
If you’re already using social media, or planning to use it for your business, it’s important to understand how social media works and avoid mistakes that can potentially damage your brand’s reputation. Our online marketing specialists gathered up some research and found four common mistakes businesses make on social media.
Trying to Be on Every Social Platform
One mistake business owners often make is thinking that their business should be displayed across every single social media platform that exists. Sure, it’s easy to open all kinds of accounts, but is it really necessary? No, it’s not.
First of all, not all businesses belong on social media. It’s hard enough to manage a business let alone managing a full social media strategy. People think social media is just posting pictures and videos about your business every day, but that’s totally wrong. The point of social media is to create brand awareness, so that you can develop strong relationships with your followers and attract potential customers to purchase your product/service(s). This requires a well-planned online marketing strategy in order to target a specific audience and establish your brand in the digital world.
For instance, if you own a retail store selling products or goods, then you should use platforms that showcase your product(s) and allow you to monitor what users are saying about your brand such as Facebook and Instagram. Our advice is to evaluate your business goals, and only choose the platforms that you can handle and really cater to your target audience.
Abandoning Your Accounts and Followers
This ties into the point made above about having too many accounts. Sometimes, business owners don’t realize just how time-consuming social media marketing can actually be.
As a result, they end up abandoning most of their social media accounts mainly because it becomes too much to handle, or lack of time and not enough content due to a poor online marketing strategy.
The worst thing you can do for your business is to suddenly stop posting for weeks, months – or even years (yes, we’ve seen it before). Not only does it give off the impression of inconsistency, but it also shows that your business is not dedicated enough to keep your followers interested in your brand. Nobody wants to follow ghost accounts, so most people usually unfollow or stop interacting on social media altogether. Then, when (and if) you ever decide to come back, it makes it harder to rebuild yourself and regain followers.
Targeting the Wrong Audience
Every successful social media strategy begins with a detailed analysis of your ideal target audience. You certainly don’t want to invest all of your time and money attracting the wrong audience. It’s important to know where they shop, how they spend their time, what their interests are and any other detail you can possibly learn.
By knowing who your audience is, you can perfectly tailor your content and engage users in meaningful ways. Otherwise, you’re just one out of many other businesses just like yours trying to get noticed on social media.
Buying Likes and Followers
This is a major social media fail. While we agree that gaining followers and interaction from scratch is no easy task, don’t get caught up into buying likes or followers for your social media accounts. If anyone ever offers this type of service for your business, just run away! Nothing good comes from “cheating” the system. The moment you purchase fake followers and likes, you immediately set your accounts up for spam. In other words, your real followers will be skeptical of your brand and can likely ruin the trust they’ve instilled in your company.
Have you ever heard of Twitter Audit? It’s a simple tool that can determine the authenticity of your followers through scoring methods to evaluate fake profiles. Can you imagine how embarrassing it would be for people to discover that your account is based off of fake people? If you want customers to believe in your brand, you have to be completely transparent and honest with your followers. No business has ever been successful with buying a fake audience.
It’s better to invest in an organic online marketing strategy, than to waste money on fake profiles that will not generate leads nor increase brand awareness. Remember, it’s not about how many followers you have. It’s about the quality of your content and the relationships you create with your audience to establish trust and, in turn, generate real conversions.
Need Some Online Marketing Advice?
These are just a few mistakes that business owners make when it comes to building an online marketing strategy on social media. That’s why it’s important to really educate yourself about all the benefits that social media can offer to your business, and try to avoid the easy way out that can potentially harm your reputation in the future.
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