In today’s society, social media marketing allows small businesses to always be accessible to their customers and also increases the traffic to your site by pinpointing your industry’s influencers and target market. A new survey by Constant Contact reports that 73% of small and mid-sized businesses are using social media as a main promotional tool. However, many unfamiliar business leaders have made mistakes within their web marketing program that can reveal their lack of social media savvy and often negate the effectiveness of those marketing efforts.
In order for you to avoid creating ineffective web marketing programs, HostDime has provided you with seven of the most common social media mistakes:
Leaving your profile incomplete
Leaving your profile only partly filled out not only looks unprofessional, but it also prevents you from communicating a little more about who you are as a company and what your company can offer.
Not knowing the difference between your ‘business’ and ‘personal’ account
Within any business industry, it’s always important to balance a professional image when interacting with customers and followers throughout social networks. Many corporate social media marketing strategies stress the importance of making your social media accounts personable and accessible to your followers. This will not only give your account a personal touch, but it will also make it more fun to follow and often a lot more interesting than those boring, generic corporate accounts. However, the majority of people who have just begun social networking get too excited and become too personal with their updates. If you would refrain from saying it to your boss, shareholders, or even co-workers, then you shouldn’t be sharing it online as part of your organization’s official social media presence. Posting messages that are too personal will not only force you to lose followers, but also damage your company’s reputation in the process.
Not engaging your Followers
Do you have conversations, back and forth, with your followers? Do you reply when they comment on your Facebook page, mention your company, or even @reply to you on Twitter? If not, then you’re missing out on a golden opportunity to build credibility and trust with your clients. The most influential professional and corporate social media users engage and create relationships with their followers by answering questions, asking questions, creating a community built around their account, and engaging with that community on a daily basis. Take the time to reply to your followers and let them know you’re listening; especially when they are complaining. Because HostDime focuses on personal relationships with their customers rather than increasing the number of clients, their active twitter account helps HostDime engage with their customers, treating it as another form of customer service.
Ignoring negative comments
It is crucial for you or your company’s image that no one leaves negative comments directed at your or your company’s social media sites ignored. Since people are often fed up with dealing with regular customer service, they will usually post or tweet negative things hoping to get a response. By ignoring them, you’re validating that your company doesn’t care about their opinion, which turns into a loss of business. Every negative comment should be seen as a chance to win over a customer or to show your other clients the top-tier quality of your customer service. If someone tweets about a negative experience, ask them if there’s some way you can help them or fix their problem.
Promoting your company too much
The majority of corporate social media accounts have a fair dose of self-promotion. The issue comes in when all you ever do is post self-promotional updates. It’s the equivalent of email spam, and adds little or no value for your followers and fans. Pushing out too much promotional information to your followers will end up alienating or annoying your current customers, your followers will ‘Unfollow’ you, and you’ll lose more and more of your credibility. Think about the content your customers are likely interested in. Then post about those topics with useful links to things not directly related to you or your company. This content adds value to your followers, and may result in getting followers that aren’t necessarily customers or fans of your company. So when you do post your own promotional items from time to time, your messages are better received and your followers will most likely respond to your company’s promotions.
Using the same strategy on every site
Although you need to maintain a consistent image across the board by inserting similar background images, photos, language, etc., every social media site is different and requires a unique approach. Small Business Trends advises, “Trying to run a one-size-fits-all approach will limit your ability to be successful anywhere.” Once you become more familiar with the specific uses for each social media site, you will be more aware of the different marketing strategies your company can apply.
Failing to measure your impact
After spending a tremendous amount of time and effort on your social media marketing strategy, the final mistake you could make would be to not measure each of your social network sites’ impact. First, you need to decide exactly what your goals are and make a list under each of your social media site. Next, figure out how you plan to monitor it. There is a way you can insert all of your social media data manually, through Excel, into an analyzed representation of your company’s social networking fluctuations. There is also a wide variety of tools that can measure different elements of social media, from web traffic trackers to sentiment analysis applications.
For more information on how social media can increase your company’s online presence and an explanation of each social network, check out our presentation we gave about Social Media Marketing Strategies at a University of Central Florida workshop.
What are some of the actions you take in order to prevent common social media mistakes?