Social media mistakes to avoid if you badly want to succeed

You are doing yourself a great disservice by failing to use social media’s promotional clout to market and grow your small business. 

Commonly known as social media marketing, using Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and other social sites is a great way to market your products or services.

This concept of marketing usually centres on the creation of posts that draws attention and motivates readers to share the content within social media.

By commenting on a post or retweeting other people’s messages, many users’ connections are able to see the message – giving it a wide reach.

One of the major advantages of this form of marketing is that it spreads from one user to the other and resonates since it originates from a ‘friend’ within a social network, as opposed to the company advertising the product.

This provides a cost-effective ‘word-of-mouse’ marketing platform for businesses to implement their marketing campaigns.

Social media marketing also gives companies the opportunity to interact with potential customers. Individual followers can ask questions about a product or service and the company can respond at the click of a mouse.

Besides attracting prospects, social marketing can also help build links to your website, which in turn supports your search engine optimisation efforts.

But social media marketing can easily backfire when done by an amateur. To avoid falling into this pit, here are five social media marketing mistakes to avoid if you badly want to succeed.

1. Not having a strategy

No business can succeed without a clear strategy. This is equally true for social media marketing, and the surest way to fail at it is to aimlessly bombard your followers with messages every second of the day.

To succeed, you need to create a strategy that includes your content sharing schedule, brand’s social voice, measurable goals, and a social media policy.

READ: How to make your content go viral on social media

This way, you will be able to wade through the noise and deliver an effective message to your audience – which will often lead to a positive result.

2. Irrelevant content

Posting irrelevant messages or information that does not reflect your company, services or products can create negative brand equity.

You must therefore think through every message to ensure it is relevant and has a positive impact on your business.

Besides, you must avoid the temptation to share too much information. Do not post everything that happens in your company every hour since such updates may not go well with your followers.

3. Neglecting the visuals

Humans are visual beings. Their brains are highly attracted to visual content, and you must therefore include great visuals and videos to your posts.

On Facebook, for example, posts with images get 37 per cent more engagement than text-only posts. On the other hand, tweets with pictures get 150 per cent more retweets than text-only tweets.

This is true for most other social media platforms. Pinterest are pretty much all visual, while LinkedIn posts perform best with strong visual elements.

4. Failing to engage your audience

The best way to go about social media marketing is to interact with your followers. Respond to their questions and comments as this reflects positively on your brand.

Never share a post and disappear. The whole essence of a social media site is to discuss and share information. Be social.

5. Not using a consistent voice

While brands seek to maintain a highly professional attitude, it is important to create unique and chatty messages that sound human.

Repeating the same message that sounds like instructions from a robot is a sure way to get people hit the unfollow button.

At the same time, it is improper for a brand to be too casual in their communications as this could easily be interpreted as a lack of seriousness.

When performed properly, while avoiding the above mistakes, social media marketing has the potential to cost effectively reach millions of customers.

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