How to Avoid These 7 Common Social Media Marketing Mistakes
What has always been the simplest way to generate home based business? Referrals from existing customers to their friends and families.
Creating raving fans who sing your praises to others is both the least expensive and most productive form of advertising. A lot of people tune out traditional method of advertising. Only 1 1 in 6 television commercials actually generate a positive return on investment. No-one under 70 uses Yellow Pages for anything. But over 80% of consumers will make a purchasing decision based on the input of family and friends.
Social media marketing provides the electronic platform for referral marketing to exist. Over 800 million users worldwide use Facebook. The average Facebook user has 130 friends and is connected to over 80 Pages, Groups, and Events. Over Personal Development venture out each week. YouTube has over 100 million views each day. The potential for your message to be spread by raving fans is more prevalent today through social media marketing than any other amount of time in the annals of business. Can your company afford not to take part in this marketing revolution?
If you are like me, you study from making mistakes. However, when you can learn from the mistakes of others, you then will achieve success quicker. So why not learn from the mistakes of others? Here are a few common mistakes new marketers make when attempting to create and implement a social media marketing plan:
I’ll figure it out as I go- the largest time waster is going right into a social media marketing campaign without any plan. Take the time to get educated on social networking sites. Not all sites were created for businesses. Also, once you understand a site, learn all of the benefits of the site. Correcting mistakes is very time consuming and will lead to many companies abandoning their plan and walking away from the strategy. Instead, learn the basics of establishing these site, understand the various options, and spend time engaging rather than fixing problems. You can find good online educational programs out there that are designed to teach business owners on how best to create and implement a social media plan.
Let’s add 100 sites in a single day- it’s tempting to go out and create a Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious, YouTube, and Foursquare account all at one time. But the problem with this strategy is that if you grow too fast, you will not be able to match all the great things about each site. The best approach is to create one site, like Facebook, learn the details and properly implement. Create your Fan page, join groups, participate in events, and engage with others. If you set up 12 at once, you won’t be as active as well as your insufficient participation could defeat your overall goal. It’s easier to have 1 or 2 2 completely utilized social networking sites than 100 poorly designed and ignored platforms.
Profiles don’t matter- users of social media marketing won’t engage with individuals who don’t have complete profiles. Given the popularity of Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, lots of people will see you before they find your website. If they find your site and you have a pic of one’s logo, no pic, or very little personal information, then they will likely ignore you. Your profile can be your first impression, so be creative, be thorough, but most importantly, be personable.
Here’s the pitch- here’s the largest stumbling block for some beginning marketers. After they have an audience, they feel compelled to broadcast their message to the masses. This sort of media is a huge mistake and you’ll be ignored if you try out this on social media. Traditional a proven way marketing practices certainly are a dying breed and attempting to imitate these ineffective methods on a new medium will yield the same failed results. Instead of selling your product, educate the masses and establish yourself being an expert in the field in which you are practicing. For example, if you are a Realtor, instead of promoting yourself and your site, educate homeowners on which they can do to sell a house themselves. In reality, only a small percentage of individuals will act on do-it-yourself content. By providing valuable information, you’ll become an expert about them. Then, when the reader is preparing to sell their house, they will most likely ask for your services.
Same approach to communication- not everyone receives information through the same medium. Some people prefer to read, others like video, plus some people will be drawn to pictures on your site. The main element is to mix up the way you post. If you to put it simply out a blog each day, your followers can be blind to your communication method. Change it up a little. When you have a blog 1 day, then put up a straightforward video the next. Post and tag people in pictures later in the week. The more variety in your posts, the more interaction you will achieve.
Peaks and valleys- be consistent in your social media activity. This doesn’t imply that you have to make posts multiple times every day. But if your goal is to make 30 Facebook posts per month, you’ll find it’s better to have 1 post per day than 3 days with 10 posts.
Take action all yourself- did you ever have multiple email accounts? I used to have a hotmail, yahoo, and gmail account that I would use to communicate with people. Having to log into multiple accounts every day to check on the emails became annoying, frustrating, and ineffective. The fact is, it became to time consuming to get this done and I seldom used my email. However, once I learned to load most of my email accounts into Outlook, I could efficiently check and utilize the benefits of email. The same applies to social media. If you have to log into and log from 5 different social media marketing sites each day, it will become tiresome and your degree of engagements on these sites will dwindle. Therefore, utilizing tools which will enable you to log into all of your social media accounts for interactions may be the easiest way to make sure that you consistently implement your social media marketing plan. Again, there are several good all-in-one social media dashboards that will allow you to streamline your accounts and social media efforts.
In summary, if you’re a small business owner looking to create a social media marketing plan for your business, then you absolutely should educate yourself on how to use the technology and find tools to assist you in the daily utilization. If you don’t know how to create a house and you don’t possess a hammer, that house isn’t likely to get built. By taking the steps listed above on this page, it will be possible to quickly and effectively create & implement your own profitable social media marketing plan.