Not having any followers or having some that rarely share or comment through your social pages is the common trouble faced by growing businesses. Studying our clients’ business troubles brought us across few common mistakes over social media pages that they all were repeating religiously and that too out of ignorance.
1. Choosing the Wrong Channels
While Facebook is the most common social media channel, not all channels are meant for the same thing. We have Instagram and Pinterest as an image platform, Twitter to post short text updates and then LinkedIn and Google+ for building professional networks. Choosing the right channel depends on your business category. Think about the features of a social media channels before considering it for your business.
2. Irrelevant Followers
Making an account on any social media channel is free and quite easy but getting relevant followers is what matters the most. Almost all social media channels offer options to invite your friends to follow/like your business page but let us ask you - Are they your target audience? Having a few hundred relevant likes is better than having thousands of irrelevant followers. Restrain yourself from the greed of having more likes. Instead focus on getting targeted followers. Some business owners make a big mistake by using software to increase the number of likes/followers on their social media profiles. Use of such software can get your profile banned permanently.
3. Irrelevant Posts
Another common blunder made by many in regard to the relevancy of a post and their business category. We all love cute dogs, but why would a local Pizza shop in Chicago post a picture of a cute puppy with a title “Like It”? Maybe just to get likes. There is nothing wrong with posting such pictures but you should at least relate that picture with your business using a caption. Something like “He is as cute as our Mini veg Pizza” will do just fine.
4. Wrong usage of hashtags
Hashtags have become quite popular on social media as they are considered to be search terms on those websites. It is great to use hashtags in your updates but you should know which word to mark with a hashtag. We have seen some posts on Twitter with each word marked as a hashtag which is not a good practice. Similarly putting a hashtag with the wrong word on Facebook, Instagram or other social media channels can make you appear in the wrong searches which are not related to your industry. To the worse, a wrongly tagged word can lead your potential customer to your competitors. So, make sure you use hashtags related to your industry, keeping the target audience in mind.
5. Ignoring Personal Messages
Small businesses often don’t check their page insights regularly and this leads to missed personal messages. Users often message a page to ask their queries and if they don’t get a reply within few hours or maybe one day, you’ll lose the customer to your competitor. This practice not only makes you lose business but you also lose trust of a potential customer. The best solution to this problem can be a special mobile app from Facebook named “Facebook Pages Manager App”. The app is available for both Android as well as iOS devices and gives instant notifications of messages, likes or comments on your page so that you can reply to them instantly. Many small business owners don’t know that there is a special page management app by the name “Facebook Pages Manager App”. The app is available for both Android as well as iOS devices and gives instant notifications of messages, likes or comments on your page.
6. Not being Consistent:
Starting with social media can be exciting but carrying the momentum is often difficult. This is what makes many business owners stop updating their business profiles. Ignoring your social media channels will bring in an unwanted negative feeling among your customers as they see the last posted date and hence it affects your business. One solution to the problem of consistency can be by scheduling your posts in advance. Check out our next point to know what it means.
7. Wrong Timing:
Another common point in our top ten blunders of social media list is not considering the time factor. Posting updates at your own convenient time is one thing and posting updates when your users are online is completely different as your posts get more attention then. You would definitely like to choose the second one but this doesn’t mean that you have to be glued to your system during the hours of high user engagement. You can schedule your posts in advance and get it posted on your preferred date & time. For other networks, you can look for options like Hoot Suite. Experiment posting your updates in different time slots of the day so that they reach a large number of audience and get a good response.
8. Not filling complete business details on profile:
Business bio makes great difference to your brand identity and leaves the first impression on first time profile-visitors. Playing around it can get big returns indeed but ignoring this section can send back the profile visitors without subscribing. When people build up social media profiles for their business, they often skip filling up all information fields. Very few people update the information on their social channels. Do not let this blunder happen with your business profiles. Make sure that the about section, phone number, your website, your email id and other crucial information is given properly.
Pro Tip: Try adding your keywords in the about section of your social media business profile.
9. Posting too many updates:
A common blunder among those who are new to social media is that they post too frequently. What will you do if you see your entire timeline filled with business updates? Chances are that you might unlike/unfollow that page/profile. The same can happen with your business if you post too many updates a day. Keep yourself limited to quality content and post it at regular intervals during the day time.
10. Interlinking all Social Media Accounts :
It’s is worth considering how interlinking your social media pages can prove contrary to user engagement. This is a common practice followed to pass link juice from other pages that meet any of the standards viz. high search engine ranking, relevant content, high PageRank etc. But doing this may counter attack if you don’t have personalized content strategy for all of your linked networks.
If all your Facebook posts are getting shared on Twitter too, first they will add to quantity and spoil quality. On the other hand, a user needs not go to Twitter, if he is already getting all updates from Facebook.
It’s highly unadvisable for businesses that cater to large audience as all social networks have certain user-segment that differs demographically. Offering similar content may add no value to your social presence. The bottom line is – Personalize your social media content to increase engagement on all networks.