5 Big Mistakes Businesses make on Social Media And How to Fix Them
So first of all, kudos to absolutely everybody who is working hard on their small to medium business marketing during this uncertain time. I understand that it is very difficult, and I’m right there in the same boat with you!
People are stuck at home right now during COVID-19, and it's allowing a lot of people to start thinking about their little side business ideas or or the side hustle they created while working full time. When it comes to social media marketing, it's giving a lot of business owners some time to relook at their strategies, start posting a little bit more often if they can to keep their customer base alive, and also to capture some of those customers that their competitors are leaving behind because they have eliminated the marketing budgets or they have just stopped marketing all together.
In saying that, I have noticed that there's a lot of easily made mistakes that people are doing when it comes to creating their posts. So in this post I'm going to go over the five biggest ones that I see and how easy you can prevent them from happening.
1 - Not adding commentary to your posts
What I mean by that is just like this example here. You post a URL address to your website or to a news article you think is good that you wanted to put out to your followers, but you haven't put any commentary on the post itself.
Now, why is that a big mistake?
It's wasted space. You have thought that this article or this link is important enough to put it out to your followers and your audience, yet you haven't told them why. If you don't put any commentary on to support your creative or link, why are people going to even want to read it? It takes you about two minutes to create a post on any of the social media channels. Why not take an extra 30 seconds to write two or three sentences?
That's the really good thing about comments. You are showing your area of specialty and your area of expertise and you're able to express a little bit about your opinion about that given article or that piece of creative. Even if you're just saying, “hey, I've got this new product" or “which colour do you prefer, red or blue?”, a small comment to get your customers engaged will help in the long-term show your area of specialty to your followers and your potential customers.
2 - Not responding to audience comments
Now, if you put a great post out there and you have asked a question to your customers and your potential clients, to your followers and some of them are answering back, they are engaging with you.
They want to keep that conversation going.
They have taken the time out of their day to read your question and to provide you an answer.
If you don't comment back, in a way you're also showing them that you don't care about their feedback. If you comment back, you keep that conversation going and the social media algorithms will love your post even more, sending your post out to more and more followers and potential customers and clients. So you always, always, always want to comment back!
One way to continue that conversation is to finish off your comment with a question. Ask them further. Just like if you were in-person and you were speaking to them face-to-face, to keep that conversation going, you would probably ask them a question. Why not do that on your comments as well when you're commenting back to somebody who has engaged with your post?
3 - Your posts are riddled with typos and bad grammar
This one might seem a bit small or a little bit pedantic as well, but spelling and grammar is incredibly important for any professional brand. There's no place in a professional-looking brand to have you, Y-O-U, spelled as U.
Now, we're all human. I, myself, have done the occasional typo or poorly written sentence. I completely agree that sometimes that'll happen. But if your post is riddled with errors, you're going to show yourself not as a professional brand, but as someone who doesn't have the time to look over the small details. Take this email I received from a courier that was shipping something to me. Each sentence has a typo or doesn’t read well at all.
To a customer, especially when it's a particular service that you're providing where an attention to detail is critical, that might actually be the one thing that turns them off from using your services, or you’ll have to work a bit harder to win them over.
If you don't have time to check your spelling or grammar, there are great little apps that you can use or plug-ins that you can put onto your desktop to help proofread your work. Grammarly is a really good one where it'll automatically let you know if a sentence is long or if you're using the improper tense for a particular verb or what have you.
If you're taking the time to write out a really good piece of content, take the time to read over it. Another handy tip, read from your last sentence up to the top because if you read from the top to bottom, you are subconsciously already knowing what the flow of your sentences and your paragraph is, and so what's going to happen is that you're just going to glaze over any possible errors, but if you read backwards, you're forcing your brain to really concentrate on the particular sentence you're focusing on, and then the little grammatical errors or spelling mistakes will pop out a lot easier.
4 - Doing ads and not having content to back them up
This is a big one with people that are starting their businesses and they, really, really want to be successful. Everybody wants to be successful. They need that clientele to get the business going.
“What your ad is doing is sending out a message. You are telling your potential customer, ‘please trust me’. What they want to know is why they should trust you...”
That's great! You can do ads to create awareness, but if someone clicks on your ad, the chances of them also clicking on your page to see what you're up to are pretty high. What your ad is doing is sending out a message. You are telling your potential customer, “please trust me”. What they want to know is why they should trust you, and a great way to prove why they should is through the content that you've posted on your page or social media profile.
So yes, it's great to put out an ad, but if you have nothing on your Facebook page to prove that message, what is your potential customer going to do? They're going to think that your page is spam and they're not going to trust your brand. If you have enough content there to show that you know your stuff, but you are still starting as well, that doesn't mean that they're not going to trust you, but they're going to see that you are putting in the effort to provide them with your story and to show that you know your area of expertise as well.
5 - Saying the same message over and over with no variety
Yes, repetition is what helps people remember a brand. But when your posts consistently say “I have this available”, “we have that available”, “I have this for sale”, you are telling somebody your message, but again, you are not proving the message.
You are not proving why.
So that's where your story, your marketing, telling your story comes into play. If you are saying, “I am the best possible option for this given product or best possible option for this given service”, show the area of expertise by showing how to videos or big projects that you've been involved with and the solution that you were able to provide a tricky problem. That kind of content will create a lot more trust than you consistently forcing yourself in front of somebody going, I have this product available. And showing that story in a video, a blog, a checklist, a carousel of posts repurposes your content that you don’t have to constantly come up with new ideas.
Old habits die hard, but these 5 mistakes are so easy to fix, you’ll simply make posting on your social media profiles easier and more fun. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out by clicking the button below. Like this post, then share it!