The social media sites are one of the easiest ways to start marketing new products and services, but jumping right in without know the best practices and what to avoid can end up hurting your business in the long run. Instead of getting started with social media marketing right away, learn what to avoid so your business can have the best chance at success.
The biggest mistake to avoid is advertising to your following. Social media marketing is for networking and advertising should only be done through the paid for ads. Otherwise you risk losing followers and losing credibility for your business. Marketing at a ten to fifteen percent rate is okay if you are discreet and use the marketing to announce special sales or some other news about a new product or exciting new service, but keep these types of posts minimal for the best results.
Another mistake with social media marketing is to have no plan. Planning not only keeps you on task for what you ultimately want to accomplish, but it assures more long term engagement because you will know what you should post, when you will post it, what the time investment will be and who should interact with followers. Your plan should also include the most important goals you are working on whether they be creating brand awareness or establishing social proof to prove importance to the search engines for better rankings. That will help you curate the appropriate content.
Avoid using auto posting for your social media pages. While auto posting assures that your social media page stays active and saves time, it ends up coming across as spamming for your followers and they will stop following you or will ignore your posts. It’s better to create one manual post a day than have three to six auto posts that don’t add any value.
When you remember to network instead of advertise, have a plan, true followers and avoid using auto posting, you social media sites will end up producing real results for your business. While this method is not a get rich quick scheme, it is something that takes time and effort but the return for the work that you do should end up increasing traffic to your site, better search engine rankings and ultimately an increase in sales and profits. No other marketing will have this value for you, so the time and effort will be well worth it.
