Are you a small business owner who touts yourself as a “Social Media Marketer?” If so, you’ve likely developed some good practices for handling your business page, and perhaps some not so good habits. In this article, we’ll tell you how to avoid certain mistakes or how to break habits you’ve made throughout your social media journey.
1. Ignoring Your Target Audience. Do you find yourself working hard on social media posts, creating new content, and posting often but yielding little to no results? It’s likely because you’ve neglected to establish your target audience. By gearing your content toward your target audience, you’ll garner more results by sending quality posts their way.
2. Deleting or Ignoring Comments & Mentions. Did you get a notification that someone had commented, liked, or mentioned your Business Page on social media? Your first instinct should be to treat this like an in-person interaction and “greet” the person who is interacting with you. Great customer service doesn’t end on the web, it offers a bigger opportunity to show potential clients that you’re a company they want to work with. Never ignore messages, comments, or otherwise.
3. Being Too Corporate. Does your online presence display as a faceless corporation with no “human” touch? If so, time to step up your game. We understand companies who want to give a professional vibe to potential clients, but there is such a thing as overdoing it. While you create content that is professional, be sure to mix in casual content as well. Examples could include a blurb about your team, company outings, new hires, promotions, or otherwise. Internal news that you feel is important to your company voice can also be shared on social media.
4. Strictly Gimmicky. If all your posts are promotions and advertisements for your products or services, you’re doing it wrong. This is easy for all of us to do, especially when we’re in the business of boosting revenue. However, it’s important to remember to mix in an even balance of informative posts, customer testimonials, company happenings, and those sales pitch posts.
5. Automated Direct Messages on Twitter. As someone who uses Twitter often, I find it completely irrelevant and annoying when a company I have recently followed sends me a cold “Thanks for following, I’ll be with you shortly” message. Whereas this is helpful on a Response Assistant (such as your Facebook Business Page) it serves virtually no purpose on Twitter as consumer don’t typically ask customer service questions on Twitter.
6. Soliciting For Shares/Likes. We all know it’s important to have a large following when trying to grow your business. The more shares, the more your business is recognized to the online community. Let these things happen organically or through a Brand Awareness campaign. Posting “Please share our page!” more than once is bad practice. Try working this into print or website marketing such as the social media icons with “Like us/follow us on XYZ platform.”
7. Over Posting. We recommend to our customers a 2-3 post per week schedule. If you find yourself posting every single day, you’re likely to experience customer burn-out and see your followers/page likes go down. Use the quality over quantity rule and you can’t lose.
For more information on how to properly manage your social media page give us a call at (800) 617-6975. Be sure to follow our Lab Report for more helpful tidbits on all things marketing, web design, and Google!
