In a world where people spend 70% of their time connected to the internet, optimizing your business without social media marketing might make you lose out on web traffic which has the potential to help you connect with your clients, find new ones or simply get more visible. According to statistics over 1.15 billion people uses Facebook , there are about 238 Million on Linkedin and well over 130 million on Instagram.
Even with this staggering population, small businesses are yet to fully utilize social media to drive their marketing process while the big brands has somehow found a way to leverage social media. In order to derive the greatest benefit from social media, small business must avoid making these mistakes.
Social media mistakes business brands make:
1. Not having a complete profile:
Do you want to be visible on your social media platform? Then give your brand a full profile. Not fully completing your profile makes you less conspicuous. This means when people stumble on your brand, they don’t have a way to know who you are or what you do. Sometimes some of your clients will not want to leave their social media platform before they connect with you therefore take time to complete your profile, filling in your contact information, website url etc.
2. Not optimizing your pages :
Just like point one above. Not having an optimized profile makes it difficult for web robots to know what your page is all about and as a result, makes it difficult to present such pages to people when they are searching for topics related to what your niche is all about. Do the symbol #Hash tag make meaning to you. It all about finding information easily on social media platform but if you don’t optimize your page and posts, it will be hard for web robots know what your page is all about and therefore difficult to present it to people who are interested in your page.
3. Social Media is not an end to itself:
One major area where small business fail is thinking that social media is an end to itself. Therefore you run promos, content, post content and forget about leveraging it to build traffic to their website. Imagine MySpace, 10 years ago, it looked like it was the main thing. Fast forward few years later and you have Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram taking over. Go into the future and what do you see? Facebook or something else? That is why social media should not be an end to itself. By all means be active on it but use it as a medium to send back traffic to your website.
4. No one is an island
No one is an island. One social media mistake you cannot avoid to make is not joining groups. When you join groups, you have the opportunity to meet with new people and increase your circle. Look for interest groups that are relevant to your niche and try to either use it to meet new people or solve problems. I got a lead in one of such groups just because someone asked a question and I responded by offering to assist him solve his problem. Today he is a potential lead on my email list.
5. Buying followers or likes
Ever seen a social media account with 1 Million followers? Except if you are offering something so spectacular, your followers will not grow to such a large amount so quit trying. Instead of paying to buy followers or likes, spend your energy building a page where people who are interested in your product or services can find useful information. That is when your page will grow naturally and have the potential to bring in more sales.
6. Not using sponsored post or tweet
Did I just say paying for post or tweet? Yes, sometimes you need to promote your contents to reach target market. The mistake comes when you try to buy followers like I said in the previous point above. Rather spend your money buying likes, promote your content to the right set of people who might benefit in reading it by using sponsored post. Let take an example. Suppose you write a blog post about “How to grow your blog” and you have 10 followers. What you can do is promote the contents by targeting people who might find this topic meaningful and are a potential lead for your business. In this case, you might want to target owners of business, content creators like bloggers etc? When they see your content, they will go to your page to read it, like you and possibly head over to your website to know more about your brand.
7. Trying to be everywhere
With the way Social Media has sprung up, trying to be active on all the media might make your job difficult and leave you with little time to grow your business. While I am an advocate of at least having a presence on most major platform, try to focus your energy on the major platform that you know your customers or followers are likely to be. Example: You could use LinkedIn to connect with managers of business while you should leverage Facebook to connect with your clients. In Nigeria for example, Facebook is the largest social platform that most people use so if you have a product or service, you should leverage Facebook to connect with your customers.
8. Posting anything
I have said this over and over again .One major mistake with social media is the way people abuse it. The fact that you have the liberty to post anything does not mean you should. If you have nothing meaningful that will benefit your readers, then it is better you don’t. I have seen all manners of post from the stupid to the most absurd. Avoid the desire to post anything. Whatever you are posting must add value to your readers. They gave you their trust and are spending valuable time to visit your page. Do not abuse it. Make sure you make their visit count.
Social media is fun and has the potential to help grow your business. Use it right and you will see the result via increase in your fan base and more visibility for your brand. This means more potential for making more sales.
Did I miss a major mistake brands make? Please share your view.
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