Over 90% of online businesses now have a Social Media account of some form.
The potential audience reach and engagement rate and opportunities for drawing website traffic are endless so it’s easy to see why companies are so eager to market their business through Social Media channels.
Although Social Media can be hugely beneficial to companies it can also present some downsides as well. This is mainly due to companies making costly errors and not using their Social Media channels correctly.
Here are a number of common mistakes that can be so easily avoided:
A lot of companies – especially small businesses – use their own in-house staff to manage their Social Media channels. Most of the time they have had no previous experience in marketing. Using untrained staff and giving them access to your Social Media can lead to costly mistakes including grammar issues, irrelevant posts or tweets and in rare instances even unprofessional content and behaviour.
Social Media marketing is nowhere near as simplistic as it appears to some. It takes a lot of time, patience and attention to detail. As the person controlling your channels is effectively the voice of your business online, it is of critical importance to employ someone with at least some level of training and prior marketing experience.
Many businesses who start using Social Media make the all too common error of opening up accounts on every Social Media platform they can find. This method may work for businesses with a long-established online presence but for those just starting out, it is a case of running before you can walk.
Don’t be afraid to start off gradually by mastering one or two platforms and then moving up to three or four in time. Trying to get to grips with ten at once simply will not work. It adds unnecessary pressure and trying to post random content on a number of channels at once will leave your business looking inept and unprofessional.
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Social Media is titled as such for a reason; people follow your page because they want to engage with your business. They don’t want a constant mind-numbing stream of posts about your brand. This may seem ridiculous but there is a surprising amount of businesses out there that do it.
The point of having a Social Media presence is the ability to engage with people in real-time and discover more about your audience in general through feedback and comments. Always engage with your audience and treat them as humans. Make sure to become more responsive to messages, run competitions and offers, ask for regular feedback and add a bit of fun to your content. Sharing boring and repetitive sales posts that look like they were posted by a corporate robot will turn people completely off your business.
Some people will tell you regular exposure is great, which it is to a certain degree. There is a line between good exposure and content saturation. Clogging up your audience’s news feed on an hourly basis will cause a lot of annoyance and lead to you haemorrhaging a large number of followers.
People will only digest one post at a time. Trying to post three out in the space of an hour will be seen as pushing too much information and may turn the audience off reading your content.
Make sure to schedule your posts on a timely basis and not too close together. Always provide new and fresh content. Try to provide new blogs and news items instead of rehashing the old ones and never use the same wording on a post twice. This will make you appear lazy and uninterested in engaging with the audience.
For more information about social media marketing and what we do here at matrix please don’t hesitate to contact us
By Jeff Sheridan
By Matrix Internet