Besides content marketing, email marketing, and paid advertisements, businesses also use Social Media to gain free traffic as well as a way to interact with their client-base.
According to Statista, in 2019, approximately 2.95 billion people were using social media worldwide. Now that’s a lot of people and a great source when it comes to reaching out to existing or potential customers.
However, not everyone who promotes their website on social media is doing it the right way. In this short article, you will learn 8 Social Media Marketing mistakes that you need to avoid. Let me know if you agree with them or not at the end of the article.
Mistake #1. Paying for Social Media Followers: It’s true, the more followers you have, the more people you can promote your website too. However, most people get carried away and focus too much on just “the number.” There are services out there that offer you a certain amount of followers for X amount of dollars.
Imagine if you can gain 100,000 followers overnight by only spending money? — It sounds like a dream come true! Not…
The paid followers are usually bots created by someone else, so even though your follower count increases, it means absolutely nothing. You are definitely better of with 1000 real followers rather than having 100,000 bots that would never have an interest in what you’re promoting.
The only benefit I can see from having 100,000 bot followers: People will think you’re an authority and really knows what you’re talking about.
Honestly, just focus on writing quality content and your natural followers will come. When they come, it will not cost you a dime. Instead, you will be making more money in the long run.
Mistake #2: Not Interacting with Your Followers: I notice a lot of new online marketers would post lots of articles on social media, but they don’t really respond back to their followers. Keep in mind, people who follow you (unpaid followers) are REAL people.
Tip: Your potential followers will read comments to see how sincere and authentic you are. — It’s like product reviews on Amazon!
It’s time-consuming, but it will benefit you in the long run. If you are serious about your online business, you should reply to comments and ask them questions.
Mistake #3. Relying too much on Automation: If you just started an online business, you’re probably working on a very low budget. Writing content and promoting on social media can be very time-consuming and not practical at all. Therefore, lots of these online marketers reach out to software to reduce their workload. You can literally set a schedule for the program to post on social media.
Little did they know, it can do more harm than good. These programs will automatically share links that match a relevant keyword, so it becomes unnatural. When your followers see it, they might find it annoying and either unfollow you or totally disregard your future promotions. If you decide to use programs to automatically share your articles, make sure that it appears to be natural.
Mistake #4. Ignoring Negative Remarks: The truth is, you can’t please everyone and you will eventually receive some sort of negative feedback. You’re probably afraid that the negative remark will ruin your reputation. Lots of people choose to ignore it and wait for it to be buried under piles of other comments. Did you know addressing negative remarks and answering a positive comment is equally important?
Let’s say a follower tells you that your product is not good. That’s your opportunity to thank them for their feedback and will look into it to ensure a better experience in the future.
Mistake #5. Spamming: I remember spending some time on Google Plus, I notice a lot of marketers would spam their links on 10-20 different groups. In my opinion, that is spamming and will do you more harm than good. — Trust me, I’ve done it myself in the beginning.
I ended up getting limited by the respective social media platforms. I also noticed I was getting equal traffic from one quality post compared to a multitude of posts on different groups.
Tip: Keep in mind, Social media is not an advertising platform, it’s a platform for you to socialize. — That’s why it’s called Social Media and not Advertising Media.
Mistake #6. Tracking Your Social Media Traffic via Google Analytics: Okay, hopefully, you’re already tracking your visitors to ensure that you’re promoting your website at an optimal level. If you do it for organic traffic, pay-per-click campaigns, why wouldn’t you do it for social media? — They are real people too!
Mistake #7. Managing too many Social Media Accounts too soon: There is a great selection of social media platforms to choose from. However, it’s not a good idea to jump on to every one of them at the beginning. You want to focus on 3 to 4 major ones to ensure that you don’t overwhelm yourself. When you set up accounts with every single social media platform and trying to manage them all, you will realize that you are stretching your marketing resources thin and will produce little to no results.
Mistake #8. Overusing Hashtags: Social Media hashtags are used to promote to relevant users. Keyword, “relevant”. I notice a lot of people overuse it by hashtagging everything and it becomes annoying. All you have to do is make sure your hashtags are relevant and don’t overuse it!
Did you enjoy this article? Please share this with your peers who are interested in running a successful online business? Do you agree with my list of mistakes? Do you have something to add to this list? Please kindly leave a comment on the comment section below(:
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