What has always been the most effective way to generate new business? Referrals from existing customers to their friends and families.
Creating raving fans who sing your praises to others is both the least expensive and most productive form of advertising. A lot of people tune out traditional means of advertising. Only one 1 in 6 television commercials actually generate a confident return on investment. No one under 70 uses Yellow Pages for anything. But over 80% of consumers will make a purchasing decision using the input of family and friends.
Social media marketing provides the electronic platform for word of mouth marketing to exist. Over 800 million users worldwide use Facebook. The average Facebook user has 130 friends and is connected to over 80 Pages, Groups, and Events. Over 1 billion tweets go out each week. YouTube has over 100 million views per day. The potential for your message to be spread by raving fans is more frequent today through social media than any other time in the annals of business. Can your organization afford not to participate in this marketing revolution?
If you’re like me, you study from making mistakes. However, if you can study from the mistakes of others, then you will achieve success quicker. Why not learn from the mistakes of others? Here are some common mistakes new marketers make when trying to create and implement a social media plan:
I’ll figure it out as I go- the biggest time waster is going into a social media marketing campaign without the plan. Take the time to get educated on social media sites. Not all sites were created for businesses. Also, once you learn a site, learn all of the benefits of the website. Correcting mistakes is very time consuming and will lead to many companies abandoning their plan and walking from the strategy. Instead, learn the basics of setting up these site, understand the different options, and spend your time engaging rather than fixing problems. You can find good online educational programs on the market that are designed to teach business owners on how to create and implement a social media marketing plan.
Let’s add 100 sites in one day- it’s tempting to venture out and develop a Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious, YouTube, and Foursquare account all at one time. But the problem with this particular strategy is that if you grow too fast, you won’t be able to match all the great things about each site. The very best approach is to create one site, like Facebook, learn the details and properly implement. Create your Fan page, join groups, participate in events, and engage with others. If you start up 12 at once, you won’t be as active as well as your insufficient participation could defeat your current goal. It’s easier to have one or two 2 completely utilized social networking sites than 100 poorly designed and ignored platforms.
Profiles don’t matter- users of social media marketing won’t engage with people who don’t have complete profiles. Given the popularity of Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, lots of people will see you before they find your website. If they find your website and you also have a pic of your logo, no pic, or very little personal information, then they will likely ignore you. Your profile can be your first impression, so be creative, be thorough, but most importantly, be personable.
Here’s the pitch- here’s the biggest stumbling block for some beginning marketers. Once they have an audience, they feel compelled to broadcast their message to the masses. This kind of media is really a huge mistake and you will be ignored if you try out this on social media. Traditional one way marketing practices certainly are a dying breed and trying to imitate these ineffective methods on a new medium will yield the same failed results. Instead of selling your product, educate the masses and establish yourself as an expert in the field in which you are practicing. For example, if you are a Realtor, instead of promoting yourself as well as your site, educate homeowners on what they can do to market a house themselves. The truth is, only a small percentage of people will act on do-it-yourself content. By giving valuable information, you’ll become an expert about them. Then, when the reader is preparing to sell his / her house, they will most likely ask for your services.
Same method of communication- not everyone receives information through exactly the same medium. Some people like to read, others like video, plus some people will be attracted to pictures on your site. The key is to mix up how you post. If you simply put out a blog every day, your followers will become blind to your communication method. Change it out up a little. For those who have a blog 1 day, then put up a straightforward video another. Post and tag people in pictures later in the week. The more variety in your posts, the more interaction you will achieve.
Peaks and valleys- be consistent in your social media marketing activity. This doesn’t imply that you must make posts multiple times each day. But if your goal is to make 30 Facebook posts per month, you’ll find it’s better to have 1 post each day than 3 days with 10 posts.
Take action all yourself- did you ever have multiple email accounts? I used to have a hotmail, yahoo, and gmail account that I would use to communicate with people. Needing to log into multiple accounts every day to check the emails became annoying, time consuming, and ineffective. The truth is, it became to time consuming to get this done and I hardly ever used my email. However, once I learned to load all of my email accounts into Outlook, I was able to efficiently check and utilize the benefits of email. The same applies to social media. If you have to log into and log off of 5 different social media sites each day, it will become tiresome and your degree of engagements on these sites will dwindle. Therefore, utilizing tools that may allow you to log into your entire social media accounts for interactions may be the easiest way to ensure that you consistently implement your social media marketing plan. Again, there are a few good all-in-one social media marketing dashboards that will enable you to streamline your accounts and social media efforts.
In summary, if you are a small business owner looking to create a social media marketing plan for your business, you then absolutely should educate yourself on how to utilize the technology and find tools to work with you in the daily utilization. If Social Media Management services don’t know how to create a house and you don’t have a hammer, that house isn’t likely to get built. By taking the steps listed above in this article, you will be able to quickly and effectively create & implement your own profitable social media plan.
How to prevent These 7 Common Social Media Marketing Mistakes