Are you ready for the second installment of our social media pitfalls series? Social media marketing is essential for most businesses, but if you make a mistake with your social media marketing strategy it can be disastrous.
We want to help you make the most of your time on social media, while attracting new customers and providing a fun, informative and engaging experience for your customers and visitors.
1. Not promoting your social media page.
The key to effectively promoting your social media pages effectively is to integrate your social media marketing with your other marketing efforts. You should promote your social media pages on your website, in your email newsletters and in your text messages.
Tell your subscribers that they can like and follow you on social media in order to receive special offers, contests, tips or whatever you are offering. You should provide a good incentive for customers to want to interact with your social media pages. Contests and coupons are a great way to engage customers.
Another way to combine your marketing strategies is to place social sharing buttons on all your content. Sharing buttons allow your customers to share your content with one click, spreading your reach.
2. Purchasing Twitter followers or Facebook likes.
Yes, it's shady, but is it really that bad? Maybe if we have more followers and likes our visitors will view our business as well-established and well-liked. The point is that it's just not good. The main reason not to purchase followers and likes is that it doesn't actually add value to your business. You get to show off your numbers but you don't gain any real engaged customers or visitors. People aren't going to start discussing your page or your business more often just because you spent a few bucks to cheat. And your fake Twitter followers aren't going to purchase your products or share your content. So you now have falsely boosted numbers on social media, but you don't have any good leads.
Also, you're not making the most of your social media budget and you may even lose your money altogether. Many of the websites offering shady deals are scam sites. You can also get in trouble. If you buy likes, this is against Facebook's regulations. You can get strict limitations placed on your account if you're caught. Facebook can turn off the like button on your page so you can't get any more likes and they can even unpublish your page! Facebook does provide advertising for your business if you want to reach a targeted audience.
Having low numbers on social media doesn't necessarily mean that anything is wrong with your pages. Perhaps you need to promote it more so that more people see it, maybe you need to provide more engaging and relevant content, or maybe you just need to give it a little time to grow. Don't risk ruining your reputation by buying phony followers or likes.
3. Not reviewing your social media metrics.
If you're posting and tweeting all the time but not analyzing how visitors are interacting with your content how will you ever know how to improve? You should regularly go over which messages were the most popular, which times were the best to post and so on. Check to see if anyone is talking about your business on social media, review the current trending topics, stay up to date! If you keep your eyes, ears, and mind open you will get a lot more out of social media.
Click to read part 1. Want an automated social media manager for your Facebook pages? Sign up for a free SimplyCast account and start saving time with automated marketing.
