I love a lot of things about social media. For a business owner, it’s obvious that it’s free marketing. As a bootstrapper (and overall bargain hunter), there are a million people using social media every day, making it a powerful tool for reaching and engaging almost any online audience.
But there is a hidden cost to social media too: TIME. Social media can eat up a lot of it. Here’s a heads-up for the top five social media mistakes that could eat up your precious time:
1. Inconsistency
As a person who uses social media and owns a business, you’d want to be active all the time. It is essential to use these social media platforms. As many say, Consistency is Key.
Having an Inconsistent Branding
When I say “brand”, I’m not talking about logo and color (although that’s part of it too). Your brand is your business’s purpose, promise, personality, and platforms (which includes your logo, colors, fonts, etc). Inconsistent branding produces a personality mismatch for your company, making it more difficult to generate the affinity that leads to long-term trust. When a company’s branding is consistent from one touchpoint to the next, the client begins to view your brand as a “friend” they can trust and understand.
Inconsistent Posting
One of the most common mistakes people make is not posting consistently on social media. People may forget about you and your company if you do not post for an extended period of time. They may even believe you are no longer in business. Of course, posting daily would be ideal, but for most businesses, that’s simply not doable. So what I recommend is to figure out a posting schedule that is workable and stick to it. And if you get off track, don’t give up! Just start again and aim for a more workable goal.
2. Not Linking Your Social Media To Your Own Website
It’s easy to lose sight of why we post on social media, to begin with. It’s tempting to get caught up in followers, likes, shares, and engagement. But the goal of social media is to drive sales, and for most of us, that happens through our website. So the goal is to drive traffic to your site from social media.
Social media is the middleman; it’s where you find individuals interested in what you do so you can direct them to your desired website destination–your blog article, landing page, or contact page.
Why is this so important? There’s a saying: “Never build on rented land.” You don’t own Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube and they can disappear overnight (remember Google+?) You could also get banned, meaning your account could be shut down for a while. It happens more often than you realize.
Your website is a spot of the internet that you own and control, and it’s something people expect you to have if you’re a legitimate business.
3. Lack of a Human Touch
Social media is all about being social. Your followers will relate to you if you expose your small business’s inner workings to demonstrate that you’re a real, live person. People buy from those they know, like, and trust, so this becomes important when dealing with potential customers.
Posts that are solely about reserving services or purchasing goods are less likely to gain traction.
Even as your business grows larger, having a human face or a personality to your brand voice will let people know there are people behind the brand.
4. Focusing on Quantity over Quality
Your goal on social media is to build a community of people who engage with your content on a regular basis. A group of 200 highly engaged followers is preferable to 500 who do not engage at all. And if you’re just starting out and you have only 5 followers? Give those 5 people 100% of your effort.
Followers who share, comment, and like your posts frequently can help your brand’s social media presence grow. And a high engagement rate can help you move up in the platform’s algorithm, increase reach, and gain more active followers.
You must interact with your followers in order to achieve results. What’s the point of having followers if they rarely like or comment on your posts?
Focus on developing genuine relationships with your audience and other brands in order to initiate meaningful online conversations and, more importantly, to drive awareness and, ultimately, leads for your company.
Ignoring/Deleting Negative Feedback
The foundation of a customer’s relationship with a small business owner is trust. Ignoring or deleting negative feedback is a social media mistake you should avoid.
Because businesses don’t want a negative review on their hands, many individuals choose to disregard or delete negative comments. However, disregarding negative feedback is detrimental rather than beneficial. Negative feedback actually presents you with an opportunity.
Reading reviews and comments is one of the first things customers do when researching a business. If you don’t make an effort to resolve a dispute with a customer, a potential customer will not trust you to do the same for them.
A little acknowledgment goes a long way. If you notice a negative comment or review on one of your social media channels, apologize and respond to each feedback and do everything in your power to address the problem. Others will view you and your business favorably when they see that you want to right a wrong.
Buying Fake Followers
To achieve social media success, you must establish a network of people who genuinely adore your product or service. As I said earlier, It is more useful to have 100 brand-engaged followers than 10,000 who don’t care –or may not even be actual people. Fake followers pose serious dangers, including:
- Many “pay-per-follower” firms have huge scammer and spammer lists. You risk insulting your real followers by posting these on social media.
- Buying followers is unethical. Worse, you will likely be found out. Facebook and Twitter have hired teams to find companies with significant “unauthentic” followings and remove them from their sites.
- Fake followers don’t develop brands. They’re disinterested and won’t buy. Fake followers don’t improve your social media reach. Why pay good money for something that doesn’t help?
Not engaging with your audience
Keep in mind that one of the most serious mistakes you can make on social media is not engaging with your audience. “Posting and ghosting” will put content on your profile, but it’s unlikely to be treated kindly by the algorithm or by your followers. Leaving a 4-5 word response to other people’s posts is something that can be done in as little as 5-10 minutes a day. Sending a nice direct message is also really appreciated (as long as it isn’t a sales pitch).
Putting time and energy into developing authentic relationships with the people that make up your audience pays off by creating actual relationships and sales.
5. Using The Wrong Social Media Platform
Each platform has its own advantages and disadvantages, and your target customers are unlikely to use all of them. So depending on your product and business, it may or may not make sense to be on multiple social media platforms.
There are actually dozens of social media networks, but unless you employ a large team, you won’t be able to devote sufficient time to manage all of them. It’s better to have a solid presence on 1-2 platforms than to have 5 that gather dust.
Which Platform Is Appropriate For My Business?
To choose what platforms to be on, you need to understand your target audience and the strengths and weaknesses of the various social media sites.
Know your audience: Develop a profile of your ideal customer. When you’re developing content, you should have a mental image of your ideal customer and create content for that persona.
Where are they located? What difficulties do they face? What are the demographics of this group? With this information, you can determine their web presence more precisely. It will assist you in choosing which social media platform to use.
Know your platform: In the same way, you need to know who uses each social media site. How old are they? What do they need help with? What questions are they asking? Once you know who uses which platform and your audience, it’s easy to figure out which social media accounts you should focus on.
Choose the right social platform by asking yourself, “Where is my target audience online, and what kind of content would most interest them?”
Lastly, think about how your content should change based on the platform you’re using to make sure it will keep people interested. For example, images that look like ads are unlikely to get much engagement on Instagram. Twitter doesn’t work if you have much to say or want to share a long video. Use the best parts of each social media site and post where your audience is already hanging out and see what works best. It may take a few tries to get the content right, so keep an eye on your analytics and make changes as needed.
