5 Foolish Social Media Mistakes

Are you working your social media strategy at full speed but not seeing desirable results? It is most likely that you are making some or all of these 5 foolish (read amateurish) social media mistakes.

Mistake - Not take advantage of your existing circle of influence

Fact - 95% to 100% of your employees are on social media today.
Fact - Everybody knows about 250 other people.

So? When your company writes a new blog post or posts a social media message or promotion, are your employees sharing it with their circle of influence? If you have 10 employees in your company, that's 2500 new connections that you might not be tapping into. If all your employees shared your social media messages to their connections, some of those 2500 people could become your new customers.

Solution - Ask all your employees to become a part of your social networks and then share your social media content to their networks. You could also email your current customers and prospects and ask them to follow your social media profiles.

Mistake - Writing ineffective marketing messages and calls-to-action

When you are writing a marketing message, the content of the message needs to add value to the reader. If the reader deems the content is of no value to him/her, you actually lose credibility with the reader. It might also help to divide your email lists into different demographics and then target each list with customized, relevant content.

The call to action

• should be easily visible (size matters ... the call to action button/text must be much larger than the rest of the content)
• be the ONLY call to action (sometimes people have two or more calls to action ... what do you really want the prospect to do?)
• should offer something of far greater value than the advertised price (sometimes the price could be as simple as prospects name and email address)

Solution - Start writing better marketing copies. Hire professional copywriters if you need to.

Mistake - Ignoring traditional marketing because Social Media Marketing is the in-thing

Yes, social media marketing is the in-thing these days.
Yes, social media marketing is much cheaper than traditional marketing.
Yes, social media marketing makes it much easier to broadcast messages.

But, all your prospects (read future customers) and current customers are not on social media. So, rather than abandoning all traditional marketing in favor of social media, do a little of both. That's what the best companies in the world do.

Solution - Spend time in channels where you currently get the most traction. If you don't have a large enough subscriber base on your social media channels, spend more time doing traditional marketing. At the same time, use traditional marketing channels to promote your social media channels. Eventually, as you see more traction on your social media channels, change the amount of time you spend doing traditional marketing.

Point is ... use commonsense and do what works best for your company now, while guiding people towards your future vision.

Mistake - Thinking social media is going to be easy

Social media is still in its infancy. Think of it as Internet and E-Commerce in 1996. It's evolving daily and much faster and any other form of media before. Unless you are aware of all the current tools and apps available, you should plan on spending twice as much time as before on learning social media.

Solution - Spend a lot of time learning and analyzing various tools and their reach. The trick is in identifying the right tools for your specific business objectives. Figure out what tools you should work with (2-5) and what tools you should not work with (50 - 200).

Social media is simple, can generate great profits for you and your company, but not easy.

Mistake - Mindset that says, "All social networks are same and I can post the same content everywhere".

If you or your marketing department does not understand the difference between the various social media networks, how they work, where your audience resides, what kind of content reigns supreme in what network, etc. etc. you are headed for a major social media disaster. Your investment will be a lot of time, money and energy and your ROI will be a lot of frustration and disappointments.

To put it simply, Facebook is different than Twitter and Twitter is different than LinkedIn. Pictures and Video posts get most traction on Facebook where as Content with Links work most effectively on Twitter.

Solution - Do some heavy duty research on each social network you plan to use.

Hopefully, you are not making any of these foolish social media mistakes and are seeing your ROI reach sky-high.

- Mayur Gudka