How to Avoid These 7 Common Social Media Marketing Mistakes

What has always been the simplest way to generate home based business? Referrals from existing customers to their friends and families.

Creating raving fans who sing your praises to others is both least expensive & most productive form of advertising. Most people tune out traditional means of advertising. Only one 1 in 6 television commercials actually generate a confident return on investment. Nobody under 70 uses Yellow Pages for anything. But over 80% of consumers can make a purchasing decision in line with the input of family and friends.

Social Media Brand Management agency marketing supplies 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 every week. YouTube has over 100 million views each 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 company afford not to take part in this marketing revolution?

If you’re like me, you learn from making mistakes. However, if you can learn from the mistakes of others, you then will achieve success quicker. So why not study from the mistakes of others? Below are a few common mistakes new marketers make when trying to create and implement a social media marketing plan:

I’ll figure it out when i go- the biggest time waster is going right into a social media marketing campaign without any plan. Take 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 away from the strategy. Instead, learn the fundamentals of establishing these site, understand the different options, and spend your time engaging rather than fixing problems. There are good online educational programs on the market that are designed to teach business owners on how to create and implement a social media 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 once. But the problem with this particular strategy is that should you grow too fast, you won’t be able to keep up with all the great things about each site. The very best approach would be to create one site, like Facebook, learn the details and properly implement. Create your Fan page, join groups, participate in events, and build relationships others. If you start up 12 at once, you won’t be as active as well as your lack of participation could defeat your current goal. It’s easier to have 1 or 2 2 completely utilized social networking sites than 100 poorly designed and ignored platforms.

Profiles don’t matter- users of social media won’t engage with individuals who don’t possess complete profiles. Given the popularity of Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, many people will find you before they find your site. If they find your website and you also have a pic of your logo, no pic, or hardly any personal information, then they will likely ignore you. Your profile can be your first impression, so be creative, be thorough, but most of all, be personable.

Here’s the pitch- here’s the biggest stumbling block for most beginning marketers. Once they have an audience, they feel compelled to broadcast their message to the masses. This sort of media is really a huge mistake and you’ll be ignored if you try out this on social media. Traditional one way marketing practices certainly are a dying breed and attempting to imitate these ineffective methods on a new medium will yield exactly 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 instance, if you are a Realtor, instead of promoting yourself as well as your site, educate homeowners on which they can do to market a house themselves. In reality, only a small percentage of individuals will act on do-it-yourself content. By providing valuable information, you will become an expert about them. Then, when the reader is ready to sell their house, they will probably 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, and some people will be drawn to pictures on your site. The main element is to mix up the way you post. If you to put it simply out a blog each day, your followers can be blind to your communication method. Change it out up a little. If you have a blog one day, then put up a simple video another. Post and tag people in pictures later in the week. The more variety in your posts, the more interaction you’ll achieve.

Peaks and valleys- be consistent in your social media marketing activity. This doesn’t mean that you have to make posts multiple times every day. But if your goal would be to make 30 Facebook posts monthly, you’ll find it’s easier to have 1 post per 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’d use to talk to people. Needing to log into multiple accounts each day to check on the emails became annoying, time consuming, and ineffective. The fact is, it became to frustrating to do this and I hardly ever used my email. However, once I learned to load most 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 from 5 different social media sites each day, it’ll become tiresome and your level of engagements on these sites will dwindle. Therefore, utilizing tools that may enable you to log into your entire social media accounts for interactions may be the easiest way to make sure that you consistently implement your social media marketing plan. Again, there are a few good all-in-one social media dashboards that will allow you to streamline your accounts and social networking efforts.
In summary, if you are a small business owner looking to create a social media marketing plan for your business, then you absolutely should learn how to use the technology and find tools to work with you in the daily utilization. If you don’t know how to build a house and you don’t possess 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.