4 Social Media Mistakes Your Business is (Probably) Making
Although most businesses have been engaging with their audience on social media platforms for over a decade, the introduction of new sites, trends, and functions mean that this sphere is constantly changing. Some businesses spend so long trying to remain digitally relevant that they forget the core principles that make social media so popular – social interaction with people from all over the world. This article looks at the most common mistakes that businesses make in the social media realm – whether they’re totally digitally savvy, or a little bit ignorant of what makes the current social media climate tick.
Neglecting to Engage
Social media management websites are extremely useful as they allow you to queue all your content from a desktop so that your content will reach users at the optimum time every day. This is the point at which many businesses feel that their job is “done” and neglect to reply to comments, interact with their connections, and miss the opportunity to stay relevant. Make sure you enable interaction by monitoring for comments constantly.
Inexperience
Your presence on any social media platform is the public face of your business and therefore running an engaging, exciting, and professional social media channel is very important. There have been hundreds of court cases involving social media, so it is vital that your staff are trained about libel, abuse, and copyright laws. Of course, whether you run a photography studio with two members of staff or a sizeable corporation, you should have general liability business insurance to protect yourself and your business from damaging costs related to social media use.
Obvious Marketing
The primary reason that users engage with social media is to stay in touch with what their friends are doing. As such, the existence of advertising is accepted by users as the price for a free, good quality service. However, your business will not attract many likes or followers if you are constantly shouting about how excellent your business is all the time – that is where traditional marketing is still your strongest option.
Allow social media to be fun, relevant, and a secret insight for your users to engage with your business on a more personable and characterful level. In general, users can see through inauthenticity and will simply disengage if all you’re sharing is advertising material – they see enough of that on their home screen and internet browsers as it is, and they’re learning to tune it out well.
Lack of Variation
Your business may have been utilizing the digital benefits of social media for many years, and you may have amassed an extremely high number of followers. One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to rely on previous success by churning out the same old content; it’s crucially important to stay relevant with the latest social media trends so that your accounts don’t get ‘unfollowed’ because you are out of touch with users. There are lots of ways that you can add variation to your business’s social channels:
- Regular competitions giving away free gifts
- ‘Behind the scenes’ looks at your company
- Including questions in your posts
- Offering your users the chance to ask the CEO questions
- Animation, video and other multimedia content
All of these methods will help you engage a more diverse viewership, which will undoubtedly bring in more cash for your company in the long-run.
Lack of Collaboration
As mentioned above, the goal of social media is to engage and interact with others. Just because you run a business or promotional page, there is no excuse to be businesslike with those people who’ve taken the time to follow you. For that, you need to find similar businesses to yours from all over the world who you can share business tips and content with. So, while social media should be predominantly social, there is a business interaction side that you can work on behind the scenes.
There are hundreds of ways to collaborate with people on social media, whether you are launching a video in partnership with another company, showcasing customer stories or offering your services for free to individuals in a cross-promotional initiative to get more business while gifting a partner more business too. Giving your products or services for free is a very popular option – this involves hiring influencers and micro-influencers on social media platforms, though it is important to choose the right people to promote your brand.
With these tips in mind, you’ll be ready to modernize your social media output, bringing all the benefits of user engagement back to your company and your bottom line.