There are plenty of places for business owners to seek out and find tips for the best ways to use social media for your business. This isn’t one of those posts.
Instead, we’re going to remind you of the things we see every day that people unknowingly do wrong. That’s right, this post is about the pitfalls to avoid when promoting your business on social media.
Posting Content You Like
One of the more common mistakes we see on social media stems from business owners, content creators and creative agencies only posting content that they like. There’s an inherent danger in doing this on social media. First, messages that only fit your world view significantly limit the reach and effectiveness of your posts.
It’s important that your social media posts attract the widest number of potential clients as possible. It’s also important that your campaigns reflect your existing customers’ tastes. Not sure what your customers like? We’ll address that next.
Forgetting to A/B Test Your Posts
After making the mistake of only posting content that you like, the second biggest mistake we see with businesses on social media is not A/B testing all content. The old adage, “what gets measured, gets improved” certainly holds true for social media.
Testing every post against a similar post is more than important in 2019, it’s imperative. Your marketing dollars are too precious not to be spent on the best possible content. Even if you have a post that is a hands-down winner every time you post it, you still need to A/B test it.
Not Listening to Complaints
Complaints are your market research. And not just your complaints. It’s also important to pay attention to your competitors’ complaints.
Why does this matter? For several reasons. First, your customers are trying to tell you about their experiences with your business. They’re asking to be heard. They’re also testing you to see if you truly care about them. Show them that you do by responding and, whenever possible, making the situation right.
The same can be said for the complaints of your competitors. Paying attention to what irks competitors’ customers can help you avoid making the same mistakes with your business. If you see something that seems to hit a little too close to home, then take steps to fix your own issues before your customers experiences the same pains.
But more than anything else, social media complaints are market research. Your market research. They tell you what your customers are thinking, what they’re looking for in products, what they are willing to buy. Ignore their comments at your own peril.
Depending Too Heavily on One Lead Source
Without a doubt, this is the biggest mistake we see companies making on social media. In a way, it’s easy to see how it happens. One social media ad or PPC campaign starts delivering better results than another platform. The phone’s ringing, so leaning into committing more ad dollars makes sense.
But allow us to play devil’s advocate for a minute. Let’s suppose for a moment that your favorite social media platform vanished overnight. What would you do?
It’s a real problem and one that just happened (if only temporarily) to Facebook and Instagram in March 2019. The cost of the outage was estimated to be $90 million. Beyond the obvious outage, the effects of the outage continued to wreak havoc on ad campaigns for weeks after the incident.
And beyond temporary outages, plenty of lead sources can dry up or cease to exist(remember Google+, Vine and FriendFeed?)
The problem, as we see it, is too many businesses forget they’re in business to own the leads, not rely on other sites to feed them leads when they need them.
Even the simplest lead campaigns can generate email addresses for your company. Are you building email campaigns with them? When potential customers visit your website, are you remembering to remarket to them with additional campaigns?
And finally, are you posting content that advances the conversation and converts customers on as many social media platforms as possible?
If not, now’s the time to start.
Of course, these ideas are just the tip of the social media iceberg. There’s plenty more to uncover and many ways we can help you achieve your goals. We’re ready when you’re ready.
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[…] 4 things you could be doing wrong on social media […]