Social media has evolved hard and fast over the last 12 years. And during that time, businesses have embraced social media because it’s “free” and (some say) easy.
Let me stop you right there.
Free and easy does not mean it helps your business or that anyone will even see it.
Even worse are the mistakes we still see businesses making when they should know better.
Assuming they don’t know any better, let’s call it out.
Don’t do these things (anymore).
5 of the Biggest Social Media Mistakes We STILL See
1. Only having one Facebook admin and/or using a fake profile for business.
If your Facebook Business page only has one admin, they can do whatever the heck they want to do. That’s like having only one key to your business and giving it to someone you hired, hoping they show up every day to let you in.
Please, for the love of God, have a stake-holder also be an admin. Preferably at least two.
And, Facebook is designed for real people to “own” their Business Pages, set up through a personal Facebook profile. We still see folks creating fake accounts that they use for business purposes. Now brace yourself, sometimes it’s a fake profile that’s the only admin on a Facebook Business page.
When Facebook busts the faker for a violation of Terms of Service and shuts it down… who has access to your Business Page then? Exactly!!!
2. Still trying to game the system…
People are still buying likes and fans. Stop doing this. These may nor may not be real people, and they most certainly aren’t going to be real customers.
What good are 100 likes on a post if they don’t actually lead to anything useful for your business?
Plus the follow/unfollow game is still happening.. This is where you follow a page (usually on Instagram) then after they follow you back, you unfollow them.
Just stop!
3. Not responding to questions, messages, comments, or arguing with a customer.
If a customer walked into your business and wanted to ask a question, would you all stand there and ignore them? Of course you wouldn’t!
Odds are they will go somewhere else and tell everyone they know about the indignity.
Social media may make it easier to ignore customers, but remember just because you can’t see their faces, it doesn’t mean they aren’t insulted.
TRUST US!
4. Not advertising.
You can grow your social media audience with real potential customers. You can move those folks into a sales funnel. You can sell your products and services through social media.
But it takes advertising to do this.
Through social media advertising, businesses can target by location, demographics, interests, and behavior. You can also test ads, make changes within minutes, and get real data to show exactly had an advertisement performed. Your ROI never had it so good!
5. Lazy automated posting.
If you are putting the same post on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, what’s your purpose in doing that? Honest answer?
Really, no matter what your answer is, it comes across as lazy. Different platforms have different audiences (though there is obviously cross-over) and different ways of talking to those audiences.
Lazy auto-posting is un-creative and shows a lack of investment in using social media to fulfill your business goals.
HINT: if you don’t have time to customize your messages for each platform, then you don’t actually have time for all of those platforms. So think about which platforms actually make sense for your business (not just the ones your boss thinks are cool right now) and stick to those.
It’s 2019. Social media can and will HELP your business, but you have to respect the system and work within it. Roll into 2020 on the up and up, lesson(s) learned!