5 Social Media Mistakes That Can Harm Your Business
As a small business or marketer, social media has become an indispensable tool for reaching your target audience and driving engagement. However, with the ubiquity of social media comes a multitude of mistakes that can harm your brand and hinder your marketing strategy. In this post, we will explore 5 social media mistakes that can harm your business, that businesses should avoid.
1. Lack of Strategy
Having a social media presence without a proper strategy is like driving without a map. You won’t know where you’re going and how to get there. Many small businesses randomly post without a clear objective. This leads to unfocused content that fails to resonate with your audience. To avoid this, create a social media strategy that aligns with your business goals. Define your target audience, content themes and posting frequency. With a clear roadmap, you’re able to measure your success and adjust your future posts.
2. Inconsistent Posting
Many small businesses start off strong but fail to keep up with consistent posting. Posting once in a while or for weeks and months can have a detrimental effect on their social media presence. You need to be consistent to build trust with your followers and stay top of mind. Decide on a schedule that’s manageable for you and stick with it. Plan your content in advance so that you’re not scrambling to find something to post at the last minute. Consistency is key.
3. Ignoring Your Audience
Social media is all about engagement. It’s about creating a dialogue between you and your followers. Many small businesses make the mistake of ignoring their audience. This can be by not responding to comments or direct messages or not interacting with other accounts. Ignoring your audience can make them feel unappreciated and eventually lead to unfollows. Make it a point to respond to all comments and messages. Engage with your followers by following them back, sharing their content or creating polls and asking for their opinions.
4. Overdoing Promotions
Yes, the ultimate goal of social media is to promote your business but that shouldn’t be your only focus. Over-promoting can make your content seem spammy and put off your audience. Try to balance your promotional posts with informative, educational or entertaining content. The 80/20 rule applies here. This involves posting 80% engaging and educational content and 20% promotional content.
5. Lack of Creativity
Social media is a visual platform and creativity is key to stand out. Many small businesses make the mistake of posting dull, unappealing content. Make your posts engaging with appealing images and videos. Use quotes, animations or infographics to make your content pop. Follow current trends and stay on top of the latest hashtags. Creativity doesn’t have to come easy but with practice and experimenting, you can create amazing content.
Social media is a vital part of a small businesses’ marketing strategy. By avoiding these 5 social media mistakes that can harm your business, small businesses can increase their online presence and engagement with their audience. Remember to have a clear social media strategy, be consistent, engage with your audience, balance your promotional content and be creative. Most importantly, always be willing to learn and adjust your social media approach based on what works for your brand. Let our team at 98 Buck Social help you get started!
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Have any questions?
We have answers.
Can you help me grow Instagram followers?
We partner with Socialboost to help build Instagram followers. Click the link below to enroll. Plans start at $59/mo.
What photos or videos do you use?
By default, we can use the photos you have on your website as well as utilizing the plethora of photos available to us within our royalty free library.
If you have photos or videos for us to use, depending on your subscription, we welcome you to upload them into a Google Drive folder and share that link with us!
Looking for custom videos? Some of our plans include videos or you can add them to any plan starting at $98/mo!
How do you mimic my branding colors and style?
As mentioned above, depending on your plan, we can use whatever you’d like to provide us! If not, we’ll resort to using your website or our royalty free library.
That being said, we can come up with custom graphics that suit your branding style as an add-on to your posting subscription.
$98/month for 3 custom graphics each week
$148/month for 5 custom graphics each week
Note: The cost of custom graphics is on top of your monthly subscription cost
What is content review & approval?
Content review and approval is where your social media content creator sends you a weeks worth of posts, prior to their designated publication time the following week.
This way, you will have the chance to give us feedback on each post in case you’d like us to make a minor edit.
Note: One round of editing per post permitted, depending on your plan.
What are the results I can expect from your posting services?
The idea behind consistent posting onto your social media pages is to keep them active with content that promotes your business solutions, educates your audience to showcase your expertise and to also keep things lighthearted, it’s social media after all!
There’s nothing worse for a business than to earn someone looking into what you do, only for them to see a barren social media page. To them, it may appear that you are out of business or potentially a scam.
We are often asked about growing followers and generating sales or leads. These are great goals to have but please understand that those goals are better obtained through paid advertising campaigns.
For more information on paid advertising, please visit our paid advertising services.
Do you use a posting scheduler and how do you get access to my business pages?
We are fortunate to be partnered with CloudCampaign.com to utilize their excellent scheduling platform.
By signing up for our content services, we will set you up with your own Cloud Campaign workspace depending on your plan.
During onboarding we request admin access to your social accounts using a secure platform. This allows us to manage the occasional disconnect when the platforms push out updates.
Furthermore, with your own workspace you are welcome to view and edit content at your leisure!
Why do my posts say “Posted by Cloud Campaign”
We use Cloud Campaign, which is a 3rd party app, to scale social media management and posting. When a post says “Posted by Cloud Campaign”, it is only the admins of your company page that can see this and not your followers.