Social media is a great tool for any modern business. It can help you direct traffic to your website and you can use it to advertise deals and new products. It also gives you a handy way to reach out to customers and clients.
However, social media is an underestimated marketing tool a lot of the time. People tend to assume that because they use it personally, that they can just transfer that approach to their business marketing.
However, it’s not as simple as that. Using social media for marketing requires careful thought and planning, preferably based on market research and analytics.
We see a lot of businesses without a strategy and as a result, make fairly common mistakes with their approach. We’ve put together a list of the most common ones below.
Focusing on numbers
We’d all like thousands of followers but the truth is that only some of them are going to be genuine. Pretty much every account on Twitter has fake followers making up the numbers whether they know about it or not.
Some businesses will even buy followers to make it look like they’re popular and busy. However, these are not real people or real accounts. They’re also usually based in countries where you don’t even trade in.
These accounts are not going to buy from you or help market your product. They won’t even interact with your accounts.
Our advice is to save your money, be patient and build up your accounts with genuine followers who you can interact with.
Pushing products too much
We all know why businesses are on social media. It’s not for fun, it’s to market a business. However, people don’t like being sold to, which makes social media marketing a bit trickier.
There’s nothing wrong with pushing products or any offers you’re running, but when that’s all you’re doing, people are going to get fed up very quickly.
When people take a look at your profile, they’re looking for a reason to follow or like your page. They’re looking for what’s in it for them. Why should they follow you?
A deal or offer might be what brought them over, but give them a reason to stay with insightful posts about the industry you work in, share articles and videos your audience would like and offer free advice. That way customers are going to come back because you’ve already been helpful or entertaining.
Looking only at conversions
Conversions to sales are what you want to see at the end of the day. While social media can pull in sales, the benefits are more than just the number of conversions.
The bigger picture is that social media isn’t just about sales, it’s also about brand awareness and exposure. It’s about showing off your brand personality, interacting and increasing your reach to potential customers before you even get to sales.
Expecting a quick fix
Similarly to the point above, the sales won’t start flooding in just because you’re on Instagram. It takes a long time to build up a solid following of genuine accounts that might buy from you.
Don’t give up because you don’t see results within the first month. Keep at it, be patient and make sure you’re interacting and becoming more visible.
Posting too much
Posting more does not equal more sales or likes, in fact, it’s more likely to dilute your profile. It’s also likely to irritate the customers you’re trying to reach which will mean your followers will start to decrease.
Posting too little
The flipside of this is businesses who don’t post nearly enough. If you’re only posting once every couple of weeks, how do you expect to build up a following or interact with customers?
In order to build up momentum and keep in the minds’ of your customers, you need to post frequently, at least daily if possible. Try to be strategic about what times to post, using analytics to inform your choices.
Sound like too much?
We get it, social media management is probably the last thing on your to-do list. You’re busy building the business, winning new clients and monitoring product lines.
Social media and marketing, in general, can end up taking a back seat but unfortunately, to get the most out of social media you need a dedicated marketing strategy and the time to spend on research and interacting.
If you don’t have the time or resources to dedicate to social media marketing, then you might want to outsource it to a marketing company such as ourselves. For information on the service, we could provide, take a look at our page here. You can also get a free website review along with it to see what’s working and what could be improved on your website.
