In social media marketing, there’s a reason some businesses (even in similar niches) succeed more than others.
Social media grants you an equal opportunity. Your success comes down to how you plan and implement your social media marketing strategy.
To get you started, here are the underrated mistakes that could push your business down the drain. Fix whatever you can or manage what you can’t avoid to keep your business on the path to growth.
A business social media profile gives you more leverage to grow your business than a personal social media profile.
Facebook, for instance, requires you to use your timeline for personal purposes.
Although you can creatively use your personal Facebook profile to promote your business, you never know when you will cross the line.
Stick to a Facebook page and Instagram business profiles to manage and promote your business.
Related reads
Reasons and benefits you should use a Facebook page instead of a personal profile to promote your business.
Why you should use an Instagram Business profile to market your business instead of a personal profile.
Optimizing your social media profile pages is the process of enhancing your online business presence as you reach clients. It’s important to build trust with potential customers, generate leads, and boost conversions.
Optimize the social media profiles you’re using by adding all profile information and the appropriate call-to-action. Ensure your profiles have 100% completeness.
Related reads
Checklist to optimize Facebook page business profile for maximum reach, leads, and conversions
Checklist to optimize Instagram business profile for more exposure and leads.
Low-quality social media content is a characteristic of low-quality images, poor videos, and meaningless text. Users detest poor-quality content and may scroll through without even paying attention to detail.
Overcome low-quality content by sourcing quality images and videos. If you’re on a budget you can search for free content from sites like https://www.pexels.com/ and https://pixabay.com/.
Posting on all social media platforms can be quite tasking. You may struggle with finding the right content and packaging it for multiple social media channels.
The rule of thumb is to use a platform that will allow you to reach your target audience. You don’t want to create content for people who may never take action.
The fewer channels you have the more focused and the much better content you can create or curate for your audience. Focus on the social media platforms that work best for you depending on the clients you’re targeting.
Each social media platform has unique specifics for the content it supports. As such, posting the same content across platforms can make your pages boring and, ultimately, hurt your business.
Hashtags, for example, perform much better than on Facebook.
The content may be similar but package it to suit individual platforms. Familiarize yourself with the right image and video sizes so you can optimize each content for respective social media platforms.
A survey report by Sprout social reveals that 90% of the people surveyed have used social media to communicate with a brand. Further, 34.5% prefer social media when seeking customer care services.
You may not camp on social media because you have a business to run.
Keep track of your customers’ concerns and inquiries by actively responding to their messages, questions, and complaints (if any). Plan to regularly respond to your customers in a timely manner – best if you do it within 24 hours.
Exclusively relying on organic traffic is limiting. You only reach people who like or follow your page, limiting the leads you can generate. Fewer leads mean fewer conversions.
Run sponsored ads and boost your best-performing posts. If you’re starting out, you may include a budget to get you off the ground then reduce the budget as you grow.
Successful social media marketing involves targeting a specific audience. Your content should reach the right audience for potential leads from which you can get conversions.
Most social media platforms allow you the opportunity to target specific audiences more so when you promote your content. You can target an audience with specific features according to your business preferences.
What does a boring business profile page look like? There’s no content diversity, inappropriate and irrelevant hashtags, unnecessary jargon, missing a connection with your audience, wordy, and redundant content.
Think from your audience position. Create and share content that solves their problems. You can then mix it with some fun.
Generally, brands that appeal to the emotions of their audience drive more sales and earn more conversions. If your social media marketing content is not appealing to your audience’s emotions it could be the reason you’re behind in your game.
Help your audience generate emotions to make decisions with the content variety you put up. It could involve time as a sense of urgency, notifications for on-demand and in-person services, instant gratification, belonging, or even a twist of the FOMO – fear of missing out!
Hashtags are so powerful that they can make or break your business. If you’re a local tax professional and your clients’ book services online, you don’t want your post to appear for people looking for pizza.
Post your content with relevant hashtags that enable you to reach your intended audience. Do a search and have standard hashtags. You can also post your content with trending topics in your field so long as you stay relevant.
It can seem exciting to get 1000+ likes and followers with only $10 or less within a day or two. However, this is against all social media platforms. If they discover it, you may lose your profile forever.
Even if you buy followers and nobody discovers, you’re not safe either. It’s against Instagram and Facebook algorithms. These networks show each of your posts to a few members when it gets more likes and comments, the algorithm considers it a good post and shows it to more of your followers.
Buying likes and followers can result in zero engagement from the fake purchases because they can’t identify with your brand. They are not interested in your posts. The only engagement you may get will only be from your real followers.
Shortly, the social media network algorithms will discover you’ve fake followers from the large disparity between the number of followers and the people who engage with your content. They may decide not to show your content and that can single-handedly destroy your business.
Avoid buying likes and followers! Instead, focus on organically growing your followers. If you really think you need a huge following to hasten your progress, invest in running promotions. Social networks allow you to target an audience with the specific characteristics you need.
Not every you should boost. Most businesses boost posts they think will perform better than the rest and that could be a mistake as it may not always work. It can hurt your business if you spend on boosting your content but still few engagements.
Check the Facebook insights for your posts and boost the best-performing posts. It may be an exception if you’re starting out and have a few followers or need to boost a post for a specific outcome like promoting a specific product or service.
YouTube and Facebook videos are always competing. That’s one of the reasons if you share a YouTube video link on your Facebook page, it will only display as a link and cannot play natively.
Quintly study findings: Users on Facebook engage more and share more natively uploaded videos on Facebook than YouTube videos. On average, native Facebook videos receive 530% more comments compared to shared YouTube video links.
Users today are seeking convenience – they will hardly click a link to play a YouTube unless it’s something they’re really interested in.
Start uploading your videos on your social media platforms so they can play natively. You will get more engagements as likes, comments, and shares.
If clients book your services then you could be missing out big if you don’t have an online appointment system enabled on your social media business profiles.
Clients today want the convenience to book your service the moment they discover your services. Not all of them are interested in visiting your website and this is one of reasons you should enable appointment booking on your social media.
The best solution is to get your unique link from an appointment reminder software and add it to your “Book Now” buttons on your social media platforms.
An appointment reminder app allows your clients to self-book their appointments and receive automated appointment confirmations and reminder messages. They can also communicate with you via a two-way reply system in the appointment reminder.
Marketing automation can make your business run efficiently. However, relying too much on automation can make you miss the human touch. Moreover, if you automate posting random content, though rare, automation can auto-post a quote you don’t want to get out to your audience.
Strike a balance between automation and activities that can give you a personal touch with your audience. Consider advanced automation tools. They have triggers and filters that can notify you and engage customers based on their reactions.
How often do you track and act upon social media analytics? It’s a common mistake among many businesses to fail on analytics by not checking and acting on the findings. Analytics shows you the performance of your existing posts with audience reach and engagement so you can
There are two ways into tracking your analytics, you can use native analytics with social media inbuilt systems. You can also use third-party apps that provide you with social media analytics.
How well have you planned out your social media marketing? A poor social media marketing plan can mess up your business because it can slow your growth with low returns on ads spend. You can also miss on reaching the right audience if you don’t have the right marketing strategy.
Recognize social media as important as the rest of your advertising strategies. The basics to this are to ensure you have clear goals you’re pursuing, assign a budget, and a systematic plan to follow through.
No matter how best you deliver services to your clients, negative feedback can be unavoidable. Sometimes it could be genuine and at other times it could be out of an irrational user. How you handle each of these situations is what matters most.
Carefully assess the negative reaction then pick the right approach to address it. You could ignore it, engage them in a calm dialogue, or fight it back – if necessary and can guarantee a win.
It’s a mistake to become salesy. That’s pushing for sales way harder and you’ll come across as pushy. Clients don’t want that. You don’t need to oversell to build a successful brand. It may chase your potential clients away instead of attracting and retaining them.
Use social media as an avenue to create awareness about your brand, what you sell or offer, and as a means for clients to get in touch with you. Do not overwhelm your customers by overselling. Post your sales posts moderately and mix it with other inspirational and entertaining posts.
It’s time to boost your business! Market on social media the right way by avoiding or fixing common social media mistakes that make businesses stall. Grow your online presence, reach more customers, generate more leads, accept more appointments, make more revenues.