Social Media is an popular word that is thrown out every opportunity that usually promises a lot but under delivers most of the time for new entrants into the channel. Often times, its not necessarily the channels fault but rather the expectations and execution that is lacking. So here a few common mistakes that businesses run into.
1. Social Media isn’t just about promoting your company: Most firms run into this trap easily and quickly boast about themselves and litter the media with tons of contests and prizes. Unfortunately it only facilitates a one way conversation and doesn’t take advantage of social media’s key advantage. Try to spur up conversation and participate to develop trust not just sell sell sell.
2. You compare yourself to bigger companies with fancy campaigns: While we do run into comparisons with competitors and big brands, social media is a platform that enables almost any firm with any number of resources to be effective in social media. Clearly outline your goals and achieve them, don’t focus on doing what everyone else is doing.
3.Social media is not free and does require financial commitment: While it certainly doesn’t cost much except time to put up a Facebook or twitter, content creation takes a much larger financial impact than people first think of. Social media requires two way dialogue to be successful and to do so requires almost immediate response to questions as well as content to encourage discussion which actually use up alot of time
4. Social Media is not a hard selling channel: Whiles it is yet to be proven whether people actually purchase many things through social media ads and whether its the next goldmine for companies, social media has not been widely successful at directly driving purchases. Social media has tons of different metrics and goals to achieve and hard sells should never be the only focus. Building awareness and trust are always key
5. You don’t have to be everywhere: The divide and conquer strategy doesn’t really apply with social media. Its always more advantageous to focus on 1 social media with tons of activity than divide yourself to look at 3 or 4 different channels. In the interest of resources and effectiveness, never feel too pressure to join every new form of social media.
