Social networking sites offers an amazing opportunity to reach out to your audience, build trust and loyalty with existing and potential customers, and establish a community of engaged followers.
Still, social media can seem overwhelming to many, as they’ve tried using it to promote their business and had disappointing results. Seems familiar? Here’s why social media isn’t working for you.
Why Use Social Media to Promote Your Business?
A solid Social Media Marketing (SMM) strategy will help generate traffic to your website and bring in new leads and prospects to your sales squad. The options are so many, from the obvious first-choices Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, to the ever-emerging Vine, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and so on.
These are all truly powerful tools for any type of business out there, big or small, and each platform offers a unique oportunity to reach out to a massive potential audience for your website.
If you’re not yet convinced that investing in a quality social presence is worth your time and money, check the last year’s Social and Digital Media Revolution Statistics in the video below, – the numbers will amaze you:
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Now that I’ve got your full attention, it’s time to get back and take a closer look at what you’ve been doing so far with your business’ social accounts and campaigns. If all you’ve had are twenty random posts over a period of two or three months, the chances are you’ve been doing it wrong the whole time.
Here’s six reasons why your social media strategy might not be working
1. Insufficient and Poor Social Media Planning
Social media is a crucial, inevitable part of any business’ marketing efforts, and as such, it should be well-integrated into the rest of their marketing plans and strategies.
Consider your business goals and create content around them to encourage readers’ engagement; this will also boost your SEO. Ask questions on your blog and in email newsletters, and invite your subscribers to respond on your social profiles.
You can even create social events for just about anything. From launching a new product, to visiting an upcoming industry conference. Then tweet and post about them in the preceding days.
2. Being Impatient, Expecting Immediate
Results, and Eventually Giving Up
It takes time for a social media promotion to yield satisfactory results. No success happens overnight.
Being anxious and impatient can just force you to give up too sooner, before being able to see the true benefits of your social activities.
Instead, be persistent and keep pushing out fresh and remarkable content to help your connections grow; and they will grow, the organic way, as you keep engaging and interacting with your following.
Don’t think you can buy followers. That simply doesn’t work anymore. Google is now all about human optimization, so make sure your online business ranks well with humans too, and not just the engines.
3. Failing to Engage Your Audience
Just sharing interesting content isn’t enough. You need to also interact with your following. Because social media is about being social, right? (to state the obvious)
You need to participate in these social communities, to be available, to engage and get engaged with. This includes replying and retweeting people’s tweets, commenting on Facebook posts, answering their questions and queries; everybody wants to be heard, and by showing that you’re listening, you can please your potential customers and make them happy and satisfied.
Speak directly to your following, invite them to chat and hangout, run contests, offer exclusive coupons, and do anything that you know people would enjoy seeing on social sites. If you need a helping tool, try Woobox to bring in new and engage the current followers.
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4. You’re All About Self-Promotion
No one wants to watch commercials all the time. And if you only share self-promotional content on your social profiles, people will not follow you.
They want to see fresh and interesting content, and while this includes your latest product release and discount offerings, it also implies insightful and instructional blog posts, breaking industry news, funny images and videos, and content published by others that shows you’re part of a larger community.
You can create this type of content on your company blog and share it via the social networks.
5. Overstuffing with Hashtags
#Hashtags were Twitter-only when they first appeared, but now, they’re absolutely everywhere. They’re very practical for identifying topic-related messages, but if you let them dominate your social posts and updates, they can become really confusing, ugly, and annoying. Just check the hashtag video of Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake, and you’ll know what I mean.
Use hashtags where it actually makes sense to have them, be moderate. You can also create your own, never-before-used hashtags for the events and social campaigns you run, and ask followers to use them in their related posts. Make them informative and recognizable, but short, and make sure to include them in your promotional materials as well.
Read Buffer’s Scientific Guide to Hashtags for details on how many, which ones, and where to use them.
6. Too Long Messages
Twitter only gives you 140 characters to say what you have and intrigue followers. And even though you have more space on other social sites like Facebook or Google+, it’s still better to keep your messages shorter and occasionally mix in a longer post.
Photos and multimedia will get you greater attention, more likes and retweets, especially on image-focused social networks like Pinterest, Instagram, or Tumblr.
Do you have a 7th reason?
Do you know of another reason why you think people’s social media strategies fail? Feel free to share with us in the comment field below! Also, if you like this post, feel free to share it on your favorite social profiles.
If you’re struggling with this yourself too, I suggest to read this post carefully, try and locate your own mistakes and give it another try. You may change your mind if you do it right.
