So what ARE the common Social Media mistakes
So you have entered the world of social media. Your company is online, it’s tweeting, instagramming and facebooking. It’s taking you time but at least you’re out there and new customers should come rolling in. Right?
Well maybe not. It depends on what you do and how you do it. Mistakes can cost you dear and rather than get you new business, you can actually turn your customers away. Take a look at some of the most common mistakes below and see if you recognise yourself!
1. You sell, you don’t engage. You’re just using your social media presence to sell. You post up special offers or information about your company. You won’t have to a have a brochure now, you can use Facebook, right? WRONG. Social Media is a two way street, people like you to talk and they talk back to you. Just being all broadcast and no receive will do nothing for you. Look at it this way, would you follow a page like that? You must have content that is relevant to your customers, engaging and informative.
2. Well the page/account is up there so that’s it. Wrong AGAIN. One of the WORST mistakes any busines can make is not to keep their social media up to date. Post regularly and post often. If your followers don’t see new content in every few days (let alone a few weeks or months) at a time, they won’t bother coming back!
3. You have 100 followers. Great news right. Eh, sorry no, getting as many people to follow you isn’t a great way to measure social media success. You could have loads of followers but if those followers don’t end up engaging, calling or buying from you, then what’s the point. However, if your social following isn’t growing then you need to look again at your marketing efforts to see what you need to do to bring more people in.
4. One content across everything. Yes the core of your content should be the same but you must also look at where you’re posting your content. Some information may perform better on one social media stream than the other. You can automate but don’t delegate to the automate!
5. You delete all the bad mentions. Cardinal sin! NEVER delete bad feedback (unless it’s libellous of course). You can’t please everyone all of the time so don’t waste your time deleting or ignoring negative feedback. All feedback is valuable and even negative feedback gives you the opportunity to change the story. Offer an apology, investigate the problem, explain what went wrong and what you’re going to do to put it right and to ensure it never happens again. Putting all this out on social media can turn around a bad story and every reasonable person will see that you took responsibility and made efforts to make amends.
6. A customer posts but doesn’t get a reply. In a survey conducted by the Social Habit, 32 percent of customer respondents who contacted businesses for support via social channels expected a response within 30 minutes. To make matters worse, 24 percent expect a 30-minute response regardless of when the initial contact was made — even if it was made outside of business hours.
So when a customer posts or contacts you, you HAVE to respond to that quickly. There are a number of tools out there (such as Hootsuite) to help you to make things easier.
