With my extensive experience as a digital specialist - I will be covering a few social media mistakes you should avoid not only for yourself, but also for your company.
Get my [Social Media Template] in case you don’t have one and to see how I work my posts and keep track of them. You will notice in my template I have divided my social profiles into sections, I have allocated dates and days and I also included a daily schedule in case I have extra social media posts I would like to share. I then added the tick boxes because it just makes life a lot easier to keep track of what was already posted.
Once you have a social media plan you will notice how much time and money you save. In my experience, I have seen dozens of Social Media managers get to the office every day, open tab after tab for each social profile and then they start searching for content and posting on their feeds throughout the day… every day. This just wastes sooo much time.
Instead, dedicate about an hour or two to your social media plan for the following week and then once it’s done... most platforms now have functions like scheduling posts so, schedule all your posts for the week. Try it out and let me know what you think of the time you jsut saved yourself in the comments below.
Right after you have done your social media plan… do some research and figure out which platform is the best fit for you or your business. You need to consider the goals and objectives of your business and what sites your competitors are using. Not all social networks are a fit.
For example; you have a cell phone business and would like to create awareness and spark engagement around your new mobile phones. It would make no sense to use a platform like SoundCloud (which is sound driven) when there are social networks like YouTube, Instagram and Facebook where you can create a video or images of how your phone looks and how it can be operated. Sound clips with a sales pitch to get people to buy into it, just won’t work. Make sense?
When people are looking up businesses today they usually end up on the website or Facebook. Now think of the info that you are looking for when you are looking for a business… don’t over think it. It’s the really basic stuff like contact information, an address or simply just a price on your product. The very least you could do is add your website URL.
For example;
And with digital and internet being so freely available, if I, myself, don’t get what I am looking for at that exact moment… guess what? You can count on me going somewhere else.
I cannot express the importance of this. Every avenue of your digital adventure should be tracked. Find out what works and what doesn’t work. You will see that most social platforms will have analytical tools for you to make use of. Keep track of your reach, your engagement, your post clicks, mentions and the size of your community. This will help you see where drop offs occur, what’s interesting to your community and it also helps you come up with fun campaigns in your extra time to engage more with your fans and how to grow them.
It might have made sense in 2015 but things have changed. Social media is now able to help you achieve every business goal you have.
Did you know you can use social media to drive leads? Did you know you can use social media to build trust through content distribution?
Share useful information for people to read instead of hitting them over the head with all your specials and promotions and sales pitches. Once they start trusting the content you are sharing they will start to trust you more and when they trust you more they will want to do business with you. There is nothing better than a client wanting to leave their details and throw money at you to do business.
Did you know that Facebook now offers campaigns in its Ads Manager to help you get leads?
Go check it out and spend about R250 and see what quality your leads are. Its worked for me and a couple of publishers out there wanting to just simply grow their newsletter subscribers. Newsletters help you drive traffic back to your site so, I hope that is one of your digital strategies.
How do you feel when someone keeps talking about themselves? The same goes for social media. You just cannot keep posting without listening to your community members. It’s a huge mistake some companies make when all they do is talk about themselves, promote their specials but they don’t engage or listen to people interested in the company or services. You need to try and connect, jump into conversations and get people engaged. It’s the name of the game.
Looking for brand loyalty? You won’t get it when a dissatisfied customer posts negative feedback about your product and you delete it. Tackle these problems and show your customers you are not uncomfortable with your own products or services.
This is just a big NO-NO! You don’t want to buy a 1000 twitter followers for $10. Getting followers is very hard and I understand the temptation but if you follow through and pay for likes and followers you will just be wasting your money! In most cases, it’s all fake followers and pointless engagements anyways. It’s usually most of the time a scam too and goes against most social networks and could even get you banned. So, try not do that. Rather spend a few extra bucks on running a social media campaign through their ads platform and gain them properly.
I hope these tips have helped you and if you have any questions please don’t hesitate to ask. You can grab me on Twitter so tweet me there! Be safe and take care!
Martin is a digital marketing specialist, a producer and always online. His educational background is Digital and has given him a broad base from which to approach many topics. His wife & little girl comes first and in his spare time he really enjoys making music.
