22 Apr 5 Big, All-Too-Common Social Media Marketing Mistakes
Lots of people think social media marketing is like abstract expressionism; just splash a bunch of stuff on the page and wait for the fame and fortune to roll in.
While that approach may have worked for Jackson Pollock, it isn’t going to work for any business or organization hoping to use social media to build a brand and grow.
Though people keep looking for that elusive easy, cheap, fast, highly effective magical solution, there isn’t one. Anything worthwhile takes effort, and social media marketing is no different. For it to work, you need a plan, patience, consistency, to experiment, to monitor results, and to rethink and readjust in response to those results.
Also, it really helps if you know what you’re doing. And if you’re doing any of the following five things, you obviously don’t.
Talking About Yourself Too Much
People don’t use social media and connect with other users to see advertising. If you think your social media pages are billboards, you’re in for some serious disappointment. Social media isn’t about you; it’s about interactions around valuable content and ideas. Make that happen and you’ll benefit, and you can even get away with occasional self promotion. And on a related note, share content from other sources more often than from your own site or social media accounts.
Posting Crap
Let’s focus on one word from the last entry: “valuable.” People want to read, watch, comment on, and share content that informs, entertains, helps, inspires, or otherwise rewards them for surrendering their time and attention. They don’t want information they can’t trust because it’s promotional or wrong or from dubious sources. They don’t want boring. They don’t want keyword stuffing or is no grammer and speling done good and Random Capitalizing and punktuashun lacking for no sensibul delineation of sentenses and individjewel ideas and LOL use some txt spk.
Prioritizing Follower Quantity Over Quality
Sure, having a massive social network looks impressive and can give your ego a stroke or two. But connections that don’t give a hoot about you and your content, that don’t engage, share, tell others, or have any potential to convert into a lead or sale don’t benefit you. So skip buying followers or devoting all your time to meaningless reciprocal following. Let people come to you and connect with you because they want to. A few of them are worth far more than hundreds or thousands of artificial connections.
Not Knowing Who You’re Talking To
Marketing 101 teaches us that everything starts with identifying your target audience. Every successful product and service provides a solution or benefit to a specific group. All successful marketing shows that group why one brand is the best source for that product or service. Determine the common traits and interests of your narrowly defined target market. Use your social media pages to engage with them on those topics, finding subtle and clever ways to tie in your industry, and watch your efforts pay off.
Using Too Many Sites and Not Distinguishing Between Them
Auto-posting links to seven different sites and hardly ever even going to those sites isn’t social media marketing; it’s spamming. Rather than establishing a ghost presence on every site you’ve heard of, establish an engaging presence on just one or a few. Interact with connections on your page and theirs, showing interest in others to generate interest in you. And learn the best practices of individual sites. For example, are the users most active during business hours or at night and on weekends? Does the site use hashtags? How do videos perform? All social networking sites are different, as is the way to become successful on them.
