4 Rookie Social Media Marketing Mistakes To Avoid

4  Rookie Social Media Marketing Mistakes To Avoid

After speaking to a ton of my clients in person, I decided to write this article to inform people of the 4 biggest mistakes they need to consider with setting up a social media strategy.

1.       Listen to your market.

YOU as the expert need to know what your customers are saying about you at all times. Customer support and building your brand online is critical to your success. There are plenty of tools and free apps that can help you automate this process.

You can even set a Google alert for your company name and you will get an automatic response when someone posts any content about you on the internet.

Hint: create an alert for your biggest customers and competition as well, as this will help you stay abreast of the market. (You do not want to flood your inbox so use a free Gmail account to collect this data)

 

2.       Determining your end goal:

Many companies are looking to social media and the magic bullet solution to their marketing problems. That is they can generate more customers and clients in a shorter period of time. But many are disappointed when they don’t get the results they want, and believe this strategy will not work for their business.

 

How you can overcome this dilemma: 

Think about this for a second. The only reason you want social media strategy is to get a list of loyal followers that will send you endless referrals.

Technically these are people with the similar characteristics as your best friend. Someone who trusts you and knows you have the right expertise, skills and knowledge to deliver the goods.

From a marketing perspective, the strategy you adopt needs to target your ideal customer. Age, weight, height, HOBBIES, buying habits….

You can start to build a list of targeted folks that will include past clients and business peers.

Ultimately you want to have hundreds of people in this network. Remember when you use services like facebook, when you send a message to one person (i.e. on their wall) this message will also go to ALL of their friends on facebook.

Having 10 people in your social media site can be considered to marketing to over 100 people. Be smart as to who you choose as a friend in your social media business pages. Quality over quantity.

3.       Using to many channels

You want to concentrate your efforts on one social media site. I often see people starting to populate messages and content on different social media sites. The problem with this is, many of us will get busy in our daily grind, and the posting will stop!

You need to establish yourself on one site and only when you have completely tapped out that market, move to the next social media site.

4.       Allowing your employees to post content:

Be careful who you get to post content on your behalf, and how much of permission you give your employees to post on your behalf.

Without mentioning names, recently a large social media company lost one of their biggest clients (an extremely large Car Manufacturing company in Detroit).

Reason: one of the employees for the social media company was driving home and got cut off.

Subsequently he posts on a social media website, Detroit drivers are the worst…

But instead of posting this in his private account, he posted it in the company’s profile.

And all hell broke loose.

The company issued a press release and subsequently fired the SEO company.

It’s a horrible mistake to make, but you as the business owner need to know who you are allocating responsibility too and make sure there are proper rules in place to comminute the right message.

 

Making money from social media sites:

There are multiple strategies you can use to increase the number of readers on your website. It’s important to understand when these folks will become paying customers.

A simple trick is to place a buy now button, on the social media site to a specific page on your website. If you have Google analytics on this page, the number of visits will indicate the number of people coming from these social media sites and you can determine if you are getting sales from these social media websites.

It would then be really easy for you to determine if you are getting an ROI (return on your investment) on your investment, and this not just being a hobby.

If you would like to learn more strategies on how to get a positive return on your investment remember to check out, the referral activity manager strategies to getting more clients.

If you found this article on the 4 biggest social media mistakes useful, please leave me a comment below.  

To find other useful stratgies and ideas for marketing, or how you can use the Groupon Marketing strategy in your business click here.

Written by Romalan Venketramen