Social media is a massive industry that isn’t going to be going anywhere anytime soon. It continues to grow in popularity and it’s a place where many of us get our news and connect with people.
As the numbers continue to grow, the more social media has become a valuable business tool. And many businesses agree with that. In a 2018 study from Mediapost, 90 percent of business agreed that social media was about boosting brand awareness.
But the issue is that many of those businesses haven’t been getting many returns from their efforts. Most can be attributed to common mistakes that businesses fall into when communicating on social media. So what are those mistakes?
They Ignore Data
If you want your business to prosper and grow, you want to make sure you have a plan and that you look at data to adjust your plan accordingly. With so many different analytical tools available today, there is no excuse for a business to not get proper data.
One of the biggest mistakes that businesses do is not checking the data enough or never bothering to check it in the first place.
Getting Careless With Stories
One thing people expect from companies today is that they share stories and aim for more authenticity. Stories are ways for people to show their authenticity, but many businesses go too far with their stories.
To the point that it could leave bad impressions for people or leave an audience confused. To avoid this, consider asking some key questions:
Is what I’m sharing interesting?
Does it provide value to people?
Am I making these posts only for the sake of a sale?
When people choose to follow you, they are expecting something of value from it. You want to make sure you’re not always posting pitches no matter how much value your product or service can provide to people.
Consider writing articles on interesting topics or share things that get people to laugh or think. Other ways to share your story is doing some “behind the scenes” posts whether it’s through text or through an image or video.
Get Off Topic
This mistake trips people up a lot as the social media world can be conflicting. For example, people want businesses to be authentic, but there is a fine line between being authentic and being so off topic you’re alienating your audience.
The key is to make sure that what you are posting remains relevant to your niche. So say you want to post a “behind the scenes” post. Make sure that it pertains to what it is you are doing. If you need to rant make sure that it’s still connected to your industry in some way.
The same holds true to sharing articles. Make sure the article you’re sharing is relevant to your niche too.
Post Content That Doesn’t Spark Engagement
The whole purpose of businesses posting on social media is to get followers into customers. By this logic, the more people you reach and engage, the more potential customers you’ll have.
When it comes to posts themselves, many companies struggle with it as many will post boring content that doesn’t encourage people to click. Instead, consider your actions carefully whenever you are posting something. Go back to those questions I mentioned earlier.
Better yet ask yourself “if I was part of my audience, would I find this interesting and engaging?”
Impersonal
Authenticity is another core aspect to business growth on social media but there are some things that aren’t authentic at all. The biggest mistake businesses make is they set up auto-responders in order to speed up responding processes.
The problem with these is that when people talk to these, they feel like they are talking to a robot rather than a person. Customers and your followers want to make sure that they are talking to someone who cares about questions, concerns and their business.
For small businesses, it’s key that you respond to messages personally. For larger businesses, consider looking into chatbots. Even though these are robots, they are more personal than a simple automated message.
Lack Of Transparency
Part of the authenticity is transparency as it allows people to trust you more. The only catch with that is if you are airing out too much, people can take that information and use it against you.
There is a lot of risk, but one middle ground you can go for is aiming to personally respond to people’s questions and concerns and ensure the interaction is positive in the end.
Content Is Outdated
Currently, millennials are considered the most brand-loyal customers around. They are also the largest generation right now. So if you want to be getting plenty of customers, it’s important that you get their following.
One such way is posting content that this demographic finds engaging naturally but that can be tricky. But one guiding principle to stick to is to make sure the content isn’t outdated. This applies to both the recent social media posts, and the content that you publish on your blog.
It’s ideal that you stick to evergreen content as even if it’s been sitting there for years it could still be relevant. For example, this post is likely to be relevant years after it’s been posted. Posting about 2018 tech trends though isn’t going to be as relevant today though.
Avoids Negative Feedback
Another big problem businesses run into is poor handling of negative feedback. There is always going to be that one person or group of people that hates what you do and will leave bad reviews or post nasty things about you.
The problem is many companies solution to those problems is to outright ignore them and pretend they don’t exist. The thing is, these people do exist. What’s important is that you take time to listen to these problems.
How to go about this is to reach out to these individuals and ask them to point at specific problems. Get them to back up their reasoning for why they left negative reviews or comments.
Some good examples of companies handling customers well are businesses like Starbucks, Nike, and JetBlue. Look at their social media pages for good examples of handling feedback.
Collects Followers For The Sake Of It
It’s an issue with individuals but it’s also a problem for some businesses as well. Some people are fixated on the follower count that that is all that matters to them. The thing is having a high follower count doesn’t mean anything if there is no engagement at all.
The key to growing your business on social media is to have an engaged following which means you want to be focusing on the quality of the followers over the quantity. This means growing your follower count naturally rather than focusing on buying followers or using other tactics to boost follower count.
Too Much Automation
The final mistake is that a business dives too much into automation. That or they behave like a robot. I understand it can be challenging at first for businesses to open up and have personality. For a long time businesses have kept their distance and have avoiding building a personality and focused more on selling goods and services.
But businesses have changed and it’s important that there is a friendly and more human interaction happening. One way to ensure that is to avoid automating your engagement with your audience.
Stop Making These Mistakes
Mistakes happen and that’s part of business, but the main thing is that we learn from those mistakes and correct our behaviour. The growth of our business is based on the effort that we put into everything. From the content down to the followers and customers we interact with. One good step towards more growth is to stop and avoid these mistakes.