How to Avoid These 7 Common SOCIAL MEDIA Mistakes

What has always been the simplest way to generate home based business? Referrals from existing customers with their friends and families.

Creating raving fans who sing your praises to others is both least expensive and most productive form of advertising. Most people tune out traditional method of advertising. Only 1 1 in 6 television commercials actually generate a positive return on investment. No one under 70 uses Yellow Pages for anything. But over 80% of consumers will make a purchasing decision using the input of family and friends.

Social media marketing provides the electronic platform for referral marketing to exist. Over 800 million users worldwide use Facebook. The average Facebook user has 130 friends and is connected to over 80 Pages, Groups, and Events. Over 1 billion tweets venture out each week. YouTube has over 100 million views each day. The prospect of your message to be spread by raving fans is more frequent today through social media than any other amount of time in the history of business. Can your organization afford not to participate in this marketing revolution?

If you are like me, you study from making mistakes. However, when you can study from the mistakes of others, you then will achieve success quicker. Why not study from the mistakes of others? Here are a few common mistakes new marketers make when trying to create and implement a social media marketing plan:

I’ll figure it out when i go- the biggest time waster is going into a social media marketing campaign without the plan. Take time to get educated on social media sites. Not all sites were created for businesses. Also, once you learn a site, learn all of the benefits of the website. Correcting mistakes is very time consuming and will lead to many companies abandoning their plan and walking from the strategy. Instead, learn the fundamentals of establishing these site, understand the different options, and spend your time engaging rather than fixing problems. You can find good online educational programs on the market that are designed to teach business owners on how best to create and implement a social media plan.

Let’s add 100 sites in a single day- it’s tempting to go out and create a Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious, YouTube, and Foursquare account all at once. But the problem with this strategy is that if you grow too fast, you will not be able to match all the benefits of each site. The very best approach is to create one site, like Facebook, learn the details and properly implement. Create your Fan page, join groups, take part in events, and engage with others. If you set up 12 at once, you won’t be as active and your insufficient participation could defeat your current goal. It’s better to have one or two 2 completely utilized social networking sites than 100 poorly designed and ignored platforms.

Profiles don’t matter- users of social media marketing won’t engage with people who don’t possess complete profiles. Given the popularity of Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, lots of people will find you before they find your website. If they find your website and you have a pic of one’s logo, no pic, or hardly any personal information, then they will likely ignore you. Your profile can be your first impression, so be creative, be thorough, but most importantly, be personable.

Here’s the pitch- here’s the biggest stumbling block for most beginning marketers. Once they have an audience, they feel compelled to broadcast their message to the masses. This type of media is really a huge mistake and you will be ignored if you try out this on social media. Traditional one way marketing practices certainly are a dying breed and attempting to imitate these ineffective methods on a new medium will yield the same failed results. Instead of selling your product, educate the masses and establish yourself being an expert in the field in which you are practicing. For instance, if you are an agent, instead of promoting yourself and your site, educate homeowners on what they can do to sell a house themselves. The truth is, only a small percentage of people will act on do-it-yourself content. By giving valuable information, you’ll become an expert on the subject. Then, when the reader is ready to sell her or his house, they will most likely ask for your services.

Same approach to communication- not everyone receives information through the same medium. Some people prefer to read, others like video, plus some people will be attracted to pictures on your site. The main element is to mix up the way you post. If you to put it simply out a blog every day, your followers can be blind to your communication method. Change Lifestyle Enhancement up a little. In case you have a blog 1 day, then put up a straightforward video another. Post and tag people in pictures later in the week. The more variety in your posts, the more interaction you’ll achieve.

Peaks and valleys- be consistent in your social media activity. This doesn’t imply that you have to make posts multiple times every day. But if your goal would be to make 30 Facebook posts per month, you’ll find it’s easier to have 1 post per day than 3 days with 10 posts.

Take action all yourself- did you ever have multiple email accounts? I used to have a hotmail, yahoo, and gmail account that I would use to talk to people. Needing to log into multiple accounts every day to check on the emails became annoying, time consuming, and ineffective. The fact is, it became to frustrating to do this and I seldom used my email. However, once I learned to load all of my email accounts into Outlook, I was able to efficiently check and make use of the benefits of email. Exactly the same applies to social media. When you have to log into and log from 5 different social media sites each day, it’ll become tiresome and your degree of engagements on these sites will dwindle. Therefore, utilizing tools which will allow you to log into all of your social media makes up about interactions may be the easiest way to ensure that you consistently implement your social media plan. Again, there are a few good all-in-one social media marketing dashboards that will allow you to streamline your accounts and social networking efforts.
In summary, if you are a small business owner seeking to create a social media marketing plan for your business, then you absolutely should educate yourself on how to use the technology and find tools to assist you in the daily utilization. Unless you know how to create a house and you don’t have a hammer, that house isn’t going to get built. By firmly taking the steps listed above in the following paragraphs, it will be easy to quickly and effectively create & implement your own profitable social media marketing plan.