How to prevent These 7 Common SOCIAL MEDIA Mistakes

What has always been the most effective way to generate new business? Referrals from existing customers with their friends and families.

Creating raving fans who sing your praises to others is both the least expensive and most productive form of advertising. A lot of people tune out traditional means of advertising. Only one 1 in 6 television commercials actually generate a positive return on investment. No-one under 70 uses Yellow Pages for anything. But over 80% of consumers will make a purchasing decision in line with the input of family and friends.

Social media marketing provides the electronic platform for referral marketing to exist. Over 800 million users worldwide use Facebook. The average Facebook user has 130 friends and is connected to over 80 Pages, Groups, and Events. Over 1 billion tweets venture out each week. YouTube has over 100 million views each day. The prospect of your message to be spread by raving fans is more prevalent today through social media than any other amount of time in the history of business. Can your organization afford not to take part in this marketing revolution?

If you are like me, you study from making mistakes. However, when you can learn from the mistakes of others, you then will achieve success quicker. So why not learn from the mistakes of others? Here are a few common mistakes new marketers make when attempting to create and implement a social media plan:

I’ll figure it out when i go- the biggest time waster is going into a social media marketing campaign without any plan. Take the time to get educated on social media sites. Not all sites were created for businesses. Also, once you understand a site, learn all the benefits of the website. Correcting mistakes is very time consuming and will result in many business owners abandoning their plan and walking away from the strategy. Instead, learn the basics of setting up these site, understand the different options, and spend time engaging rather than fixing problems. You can find good online educational programs on the market that can teach business owners on how best to create and implement a social media plan.

Let’s add 100 sites in one day- it’s tempting to go out and develop a Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious, YouTube, and Foursquare account all at once. But the problem with this strategy is that if you grow too fast, you will not be able to match all the benefits of each site. The very best approach is to create one site, like Facebook, learn the facts and properly implement. Create your Fan page, join groups, participate in events, and build relationships others. If you start up 12 at once, you will not be as active and your lack of participation could defeat your overall goal. It’s easier to have 1 or 2 2 completely utilized social networking sites than 100 poorly designed and ignored platforms.

Profiles don’t matter- users of social media won’t engage with individuals who don’t have complete profiles. Given the popularity of Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, many people will see you before they find your site. If they find your site and you also have a pic of one’s logo, no pic, or hardly any personal information, then they will likely ignore you. Your profile can be your first impression, so be creative, be thorough, but most importantly, be personable.

Here’s the pitch- here’s the biggest stumbling block for some beginning marketers. After they have an audience, they feel compelled to broadcast their message to the masses. This sort of media is a huge mistake and you’ll be ignored if you try out this on social media. Traditional a proven way marketing practices certainly are a dying breed and trying to imitate these ineffective methods on a fresh medium will yield exactly the same failed results. Instead of selling your product, educate the masses and establish yourself being an expert in the field in which you are practicing. For instance, if you are an agent, instead of promoting yourself and your site, educate homeowners on which they can do to sell a house themselves. The truth is, only a small percentage of people will act on do-it-yourself content. By providing valuable information, you’ll become an expert about them. Then, when the reader is preparing to sell her or his house, they will probably ask for your services.

Same approach to communication- not everyone receives information through the same medium. Some people prefer to read, others like video, plus some people will be drawn to pictures on your site. The key is to mix up the way you post. If you to put it simply out a blog each day, your followers can be blind to your communication method. Change it up a little. Assuming you have a blog one day, then put up a simple video another. Social Media Marketing agency and tag people in pictures later in the week. The more variety in your posts, the more interaction you’ll achieve.

Peaks and valleys- be consistent in your social media activity. This doesn’t mean that you have to make posts multiple times each day. But if your goal would be to make 30 Facebook posts per month, you’ll find it’s easier to have 1 post each day than 3 days with 10 posts.

Take action all yourself- did you ever have multiple email accounts? I used to have a hotmail, yahoo, and gmail account that I’d use to communicate with people. Needing to log into multiple accounts each day to check on the emails became annoying, time consuming, and ineffective. The fact is, it became to frustrating to do this and I hardly ever used my email. However, once I learned to load most of my email accounts into Outlook, I could efficiently check and utilize the benefits of email. The same applies to social media. When you have to log into and log off of 5 different social media marketing sites each day, it’ll become tiresome and your degree of engagements on these sites will dwindle. Therefore, utilizing tools that may enable you to log into all your social media accounts for interactions may be the easiest way to ensure that you consistently implement your social media plan. Again, there are a few good all-in-one social media marketing dashboards that will allow you to streamline your accounts and social networking efforts.
In summary, if you’re a small business owner looking to create a social media plan for your business, then you absolutely should learn how to use the technology and find tools to assist you in the daily utilization. If you don’t know how to create a house and you don’t have a hammer, that house isn’t going to get built. By firmly taking the steps listed above in the following paragraphs, it will be easy to quickly and effectively create & implement your personal profitable social media marketing plan.