By the reckoning of Internet years, social media has been around for quite sometimes. Now everybody is familiar with it and already using it. Every marketers have turned into “social media gurus” and preaching about it, and every businesses are already on the bandwagon.
For companies, every actions they take affect the bottomline. Every kinds of investment – time, money, human resources – they make must have a justifiable ROI. This is the very core of a business with healthy cashflow. With social media marketing, it seems that core concept of getting real results that ultimately contribute to ROI is elusive. To many companies, social media marketing is like a treasure hunt – a hunt without a proper map and preparation.
Given the low (or almost non-existent) entry barrier to social media, companies will immediately jump on the bandwagon, setup a couple of accounts, and begin to wander down the journey without an actual battle plan. Then three months later, they will call it a waste of time and become inactive on social media channels. When someone mentioned to them about social media or they stumble upon some news about how awesome social media is for businesses, then they will get excited and get back onto social media, only to lose interest after awhile again. This vicious cycle will repeat itself until something more shiny comes along.
However, social media is inherently different from traditional marketing. Plus it is relatively new to business world as a viable marketing channel, so it is not a surprising thing that not every companies get it right. Mistakes are bound to happen, but lessons will be learnt.
Here are top 5 biggest mistakes most businesses make in social media marketing, and how you can avoid them.
#1 – Broadcasting Rather Than Engaging
Traditional advertising and marketing media allows businesses to broadcast messages to a wide range of audience. There is no viable mean for the targeted audience to communicate back, nor a real way to measure the impact and influence of the advertising message.
Marketers have been using these one-way marketing channels for decades and already internalized the habits and strategies from using such channels. And they carried over those habits and strategies to social media, treating it the same as other traditional media they are so used to. This is where the problem begins.
Unlike traditional media, social media allows a true two-way communication. This allows bonds between brands and people to form, use emotions and relationships for non-intrusive marketing, and effectively filter out every other marketing noises people are exposed to on daily basis.
But, rather than utilising this amazing two-way communication channel, marketers keep pushing messages, ads, and press releases down the throat of its audience. They treat social media as yet another broadcasting channel. And they wonder why nobody interacts with them.
This is very wrong approach. If you really want to use social media to its full potential, treat it in the same way as real world socializing and networking parties. You don’t expect to get a positive return and full attention when you keep shouting about your company’s new product launch or recite news headlines to a room full of people from your market. Likewise in social media, instead of broadcasting your messages, start conversations or join one. Add value to it. Keep building a community around conversations in your social media channels. This is how you buy ultimate attention from people in your target market, without spending millions of dollars.
#2 – Ignoring/Deleting Negative Comments
Let’s face it. We all want people to love us. Heck, if we can get love perfume or magic from Aphrodite, we would get and use it on ourselves. People are social creatures, and it is not a surprising thing.
But then, the reality is that we cannot please everybody. Our companies cannot please every consumers in the market. Mistakes are bound to happen. Maybe it is an oversight from customer service department. Maybe your customer is upset because a product she/he wants is out of stock. Regardless of the case, negativity from your market is something you cannot avoid. It is inevitable, even to the best of the bests like Soutwest Airlines.
Many amateur social media marketers tend to police negative comments, or they just simply ignore them and secretly hoping it would go away. If you are one of them, stop everything you are doing and read on. You might be damaging your brand beyond repair.
People comment or tweet about negative things because they want your response and attention. They are not just bad-mouthing about you because they have all the time in the world. Ignore them, and you are validating to them and the world (yes, the world because social media is very public and what gets on the Internet stays on the Internet). By policing and deleting them, you are showing you aren’t sincere enough and people will start to wonder what else you have to hide.
In fact, negative comments are a chance to win more confident from your customers. Treat them with care, and see if you can help them somehow or fix their problems. Sometimes, the issue might be beyond your capability. But then, simply reaching out will make a difference and most often than not turn the negative into a positive one.
#3 – Obsessing Over Numbers
Many social media marketers tend to measure their success of a social media campaign with how many followers, “Likes”, fans or friends they have gained. While this is not a wrong approach, these numbers only represent one dimension and aspect among everything that indicates a successful social media marketing campaign.
Numbers don’t count (no pun intended) for everything, but true engagement is. According to statistics from a PageLever study, only 3 to 7.5 percent of your Facebook fans actually see your posts. Facebook statistics show that an average user has about 130 friends, and connected to 80 pages, events and groups. Imagine there are 3 updates a day from each of these, then there are total of 600+ updates an average Facebook user is exposed to on daily basis. When you break it down to these numbers, you will realize that numbers in your social media profiles don’t actually have that much impact.
The real impact comes from true engagement with your audience. Keep on creating and joining conversations, and creating great contents that provide so much values for your fans and followers. The more interactivity that occurs around the contents you created and conversations you participate in, the better it is.
#4 – Pushing, Not Pulling
Imagine you are having a great conversation with someone you just met in a bar. She/he is really friendly, and you really enjoy the company you are having. This is followed up by a few phone calls and great chats. Then when all is well, your new friend starts to sell you gym membership or insurance plan or (insert anything you hate being sold to here). That “friend” would get rather pushy and calls you multiple times a day to corner you into buying whatever she/he is selling. You would totally love it, right? Right?
If you don’t (chances are, you won’t), then why would you adopt the same strategies on social media marketing for your company? Unfortunately, this is where most businesses that use social media so well fail. After social media generates a highly qualified prospects, businesses will dump down those leads into traditional sales funnel and process. The problem is, people totally hate to be sold, but love to buy.
Building a relationship is utterly important in social media marketing. And just like in the real world, we will have to work hard to build relationships with our market and develop trust. But then, if you are really overwhelmed by all these online relationship building stuffs, you can immediately kill it by pushing “BUY THIS NOW” messages down the throat of your fans and followers. This will annoy the heck out of your audience and you will begin to lose followers.
Instead of using traditional push-strategy in sales, what you can do is to provide valuable advice and contents around your offerings, and give a clear call to actions so that your audience knows what to do when they are in need of your products and services. If you have been helpful to them in particular issues relating to your offerings, chances are that they will remember you when they want to buy.
#5 – No Battle Plan
This should be, in fact, #1 mistake most businesses commit in their social media marketing. Because of non-existent barrier to entry, most businesses will happily jump onto social media bandwagon without any solid plan nor strategy. They just create accounts (since they are free!) and start posting “stuffs” online.
Without a clear plan and objectives to achieve, there is nothing to measure. Without anything to measure, you are just going to waste your time typing and posting “stuffs” on your social media channels. And those “stuffs” might not even be what your audience is looking for.
Before you jump into social media marketing, determine the strategies you are going to employ. Think about the direction you want to take for your social media efforts. Also determine key performance indicators to effectively measure your social media campaign’s performance. Even if you cannot determine how it will directly contribute to your ROI, you should be able to measure at least the brand exposure and outreach based on social media influence, how many people are talking about you, and fans engagement.
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