For small- and medium-sized businesses, the availability of social media sites represents a cost-effective solution for marketing over the Internet. These platforms are free to use and simple to work with, and they provide unbeatable reach in terms of connecting with customers.
Even with their advantages, however, social media sites aren’t fool-proof. Mistakes could arise in how you use these tools, causing confusion or frustration in your customers. These are obviously not ideal, and you should do your best to prevent them from happening.
How is this possible? The first step would be for you to know what kind of mistakes to avoid, and it just so happens that we’ve outlined some of the most common ones in the sections below.
1. Not having complete business details
Your social media accounts must contain all the relevant information that your customers need. This would include details such as your area of service coverage, your business operating times, and your contact information. Without these, customers wouldn’t know how to reach you or whether they could in the first place.
To prevent this from happening, you need to be sure that your business profiles are complete and up-to-date. Can you imagine how many potential customers you could lose if you input the wrong phone number? With some due diligence, hopefully, you wouldn’t have to.
2. Reusing the same content for each social media site
Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are all very different environments. While all of them might be targeting the same audience, each one is designed for a specific type of content. Instagram, for instance, is meant for imagery and short videos, while Twitter is primarily text-based.
What this means is that you can’t simply take the content you produce for one platform and use it on several others. For example, banner-type images might make sense on Facebook, but they’ll definitely not look great on Instagram. Reusing the same banner there would mean that its contents will be cropped or too small to decipher.
3. Losing cohesion between each platform
The content you produce for each social media site should be formatted differently, but you must ensure that they reflect the same brand regardless. Think of it in terms of building a strong brand across your entire online presence. You can’t do that if each of your accounts is projecting a different image.
Start by creating a persona that your business can adopt. Then, make sure this person is clearly identifiable in all your social media accounts. You can do this by using the same type of language in all your posts. You can also use consistent visual styles or content elements that immediately make a post recognizable as your brand’s.
4. Not following a posting schedule
Social media sites tend to favor profiles that post consistently. In addition to this, customers also tend to unfollow accounts that post too much or too little. In other words, you need to schedule your posts so that they are maintaining the right levels of visibility for your business.
Try to find the times within a day when you get the most amount of engagement on social media. These will let you design and maintain a schedule that allows you to reach the most people without unnecessarily flooding their feeds.
5. Failing to respond to comments and messages
One of the biggest advantages of social media is that it allows you to stay in close contact with your customers. These platforms allow you to communicate to people even when they in completely different timezones. Now, would you want to waste that valuable opportunity?
Make sure you regularly check your inbox so that no message is left ignored. Whatever their contents—whether good or bad—you must respond to them to show your customers that you value their feedback and you’re willing to make changes to serve them better.
6. Overlooking sponsored advertisements
Social media sites provide you with the option to purchase ads that can target specific markets. These ads are highly effective, as they let you hone in on a particular geographic location or a set of customer demographics. They will even be visible to people who don’t follow your accounts.
The best part is that these ads are incredibly easy to execute. They also provide immediate results that you can track and measure. All the tools are already there, so don’t be afraid to experiment to see what works best.
7. Forgetting about the call-to-action
All your efforts at social media marketing would mean nothing if it doesn’t elicit some type of beneficial action from the viewer. After all, these are not personal spaces that are simply meant to inform or entertain. Your social media pages serve a higher purpose, and that’s to make it easy for customers to give you their business.
Make sure that each post you publish instructs people on what to do next. Whether it is to sign up for a newsletter, book an appointment, or make a purchase, every piece of content that makes it into your feed should have a call-to-action that contributes to your success.
8. Ignoring the results
Social media accounts, if they’re set up properly, provide tools that let you measure their performance. These let you see how many people are seeing your content, which posts are successful, and many other metrics that give you insight into your overall marketing campaign.
You shouldn’t put all this valuable data to waste. Use this information to revisit your current strategy and draft changes that improve upon it. For example, if you find that a funny post you published has garnered a lot of positive responses, then you might want to shift your future posts toward a similar tone. It’s about listening to what your customers want and then providing it to them later on.
Conclusion
There you have it! These eight common mistakes are committed by a surprisingly large number of businesses. Make sure that you do your best to avoid them so that you can make the most out of your social media marketing efforts.
We are a full-service digital marketing agency in St. Louis, Missouri, aiming to transform businesses into stronger brands both in the real world and online. Get in touch with us today if you’d like to see how we can help you achieve that.