Businesses can use social media to amplify their reach. It can be either easy or hard to get the best results, but it's definitely easy to make mistakes.
For the most part, minor errors can be forgiven. Your business is run by humans, and so are your audiences. We're all humans, and humans make mistakes. However, there are some mistakes that should be avoided at all cost.
These mistakes can hurt your online reputation, potentially making your business losing followers. What's more, people will generally judge you as unprofessional, potentially nullifying all your work you've put into building an active, engaging social presence.
Below is a list of the most common social media mistakes businesses can make.
Sharing All About Yourself And Your Business
Being egoistical won't help you shine on social media. Even if you have great presence and active with many followers, always talking about yourself and putting you at the center in all of your post will only bore your audience.
As a brand, you should instead focus on the message your audience really want. For example, you may want to talk about the benefits of people using your services, but for the rest of the time, you need to also become part of the conversation using your knowledge and experience to help people out.
Ignoring Your Audience
The next fatal mistake when it comes to your business on social media, is ignoring your audience's needs and expectations.
Know what your business and what it does, and highlight the brand using a carefully curated voice. Answer all queries when possible, and reply to those who ask for help/opinion. Social media is all about being social, so it's wise for you to be communicative and engage back to people to have reached you.
Having Limited Content Types
What contents do you have? If you have several of types, why not share them all? One of the biggest social media mistake when it comes to your business, is when you're only sharing a limited type of content.
Try to share videos, infographics, images, blog posts, mentions and others. Besides making your social media page a lot more colorful, the approach can also appeal a wider range of audience, and also keep your interested users from being bored.
As a general rule, you need to share a mix of corporate and educational posts to maintain readers' interests.
Not Listening To Feedback And Discussions
Your website is online 24/7. That's good as it is a must. But your social media presence, is probably the first thing that people use to judge you.
On social media, you need to have your ears open at all time. Social media where your consumers are at a global scale, and is the direct line they can connect to you.
Social media is also a place where discussions happen. As a business that wants to thrive on the web, it's best for you to follow most if not all of those conversation, especially those that involves your niche/industry, so you can better understand what consumers really need, and their feelings toward your business.
Focusing On Social Presence, With No Personality
For businesses to succeed, they need to have plenty of sales-focused strategies. They can include pitches, as well as contents.
However, on social media, your business should also build a mix of educational, engaging and exciting posts that follow the trends.
Here, you need to build contents with the demographic of your audience. This is where you need to be more like a publisher than a brand whose main purpose of existence is only to sell.
Not Valuing Engagements
You can post multiple times a day on social media networks, and no one will probably stop you. However, there are many companies that fail on social media because they don't understand that content marketing needs a different approach than advertising.
So no, you shouldn't approach your audience with the sole intention of draining their wallets. Instead, see them as people who put their trust on you. Here, you need to genuinely engage with them; convince them with your expertise by first offering some value.
Ignoring Negative Reviews And Comments
"We all need people who will give us feedback. That's how we improve," Microsoft's founder Bill Gates once said.
So instead of removing or deleting those negative reviews/comments people gave you because of hating you, thank them. Those bad and probably painful feedback can actually be a way for you to improve your brand.
If you ever receive bad or negative reviews/comments, it's wise for you to not defend yourself directly. Usually, if you put an aggressive stance to reply those people, they will bring even more negative reviews/comments.
Spelling And Grammar Mistakes
We occasionally see these mistakes. Even popular newspaper, corporate websites and influencers' blogs can never be a 100 percent sure that their writings are flawless.
Yes, people make mistakes. But when it comes to spelling and grammar mistakes, do please put them down to the minimum.
This is because one tiny mistake can take away all of your overall messaging effort. Instead of receiving your message loud and clear, they will focus on what's wrong rather than what's right. And this can be a bad thing.
To eliminate the mistakes, or at least minimizing the risks, try to always double check your contents before making them live. And when they're already live, you can still correct them, but try to do that as soon as possible.
Poor Customer Service
You need to always put your ears on social media, to know about the trends and read about people's complaints.
Your audience will certainly value and appreciate your business if you can address their problems quickly. It's all about engagement and polite communication.
Since almost every people on the internet have their own social media account, many of them will be more likely to post their concerns or questions online. Take too long or being unhelpful, or worse, ignoring them altogether, you will see those consumers depart and seek for a better brand than you.
Having Insensitive/Irresponsible Contents
Trends change, politics also, and so as almost everything else. Here, you need to be sensitive and understand the situation of what you're trying to say, at all times.
Sensitivity and consideration for others should be your priority on social media, because this is where you brand is communicating with a broader audience. People have different thoughts and feelings toward something, so try to be neutral in every scenario.
Your business social media account should always reflect your brand's image and culture. You should have a standard you need to follow. But keep everything in mind when posting your content, as irresponsible/insensitive posts will certainly annoy people.
Too Many Hashtags
Hashtags can do wonders to a social media posts. But too many can make it worse.
When posting on social media networks, be careful of using too many hashtags or tagged handles, as your content may come off as something desperate for engagement.
A bad thing for you, your brand, and its reputation.
Failing Two-Way Conversation
One of the advantages of social media networks is that, they allow two-way engagement, in real-time. This allows your brand and its customers to directly communicate with one another, in a dialogue that is easy to follow.
If your brand just love to post and promote, but neglect two-way engagement, either public or private, your brand is definitely missing great relationships with customers. You'll lose valuable insights, customers, influencers and even opportunities.