Social media is a really wonderful tool for businesses and their customers alike. At its best, it’s an open communication channel between businesses and their customers. Social audiences can become earned media that businesses can benefit from and well managed profiles and platforms enable customers a quick and accessible means of communicating with a business. At its worst, however, social media can become a business nightmare.
Here are 5 terrible social media habits businesses suffer from all too frequently.
1. Setting out on Social with No Clear Objective
“We should get on Facebook because our competitor is there.”
“We should be on Twitter because everyone else is.”
“Such and such a body said that we need a Google Plus page.”
All of those are awful, awful statements. Social media shouldn’t be a ‘just because.’ Any business embarking upon a social media campaign should have some clear and measurable objectives.
Maybe you want to increase traffic from social profiles, maybe you want to increase mentions of your brand online or maybe you want to reduce the number of customer service calls you take by channelling more of them through social media. Whatever you want to achieve, you should have a clear idea of it before you even create a profile!
2. Setting up and leaving dormant
There are plenty of examples of dormant Facebook pages and Twitter profiles. This is a really awful mistake. If people are trying to communicate with you via social media channels and your profiles are unmanned, you run the risk of leading your customers to believe that you are just ignoring them.
3. Begging and Pleading for Likes and Shares
This is a pet peeve of mine. It’s tacky and it’s annoying. Users should feel inclined to share your content because your content is shareable – not because you’ve begged them to!
4. Over Advertising
Trying to over sell products on social media platforms has frequently been likened to trying to sell a product to people talking at a bar and with good reason. By all means, share your offers and updates. But don’t make it all about you. It should be about your audience too.
5. Failing to Measure
Setting clear objectives before you get started is one thing, but it becomes irrelevant if you don’t measure based around that objective. In the same way you would regularly analyse and measure your PPC or your SEO campaign, you should do the same with your social media campaign.
This post was written exclusively for us by Stacey Cavanagh of blogsession.co.uk.