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. A lot of people tune out traditional means of advertising. Only 1 1 in 6 television commercials actually generate a confident return on investment. No-one under 70 uses Yellow Pages for anything. But over 80% of consumers can make a purchasing decision using the input of family and friends.

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

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

I’ll figure it out as I go- the biggest time waster is going into a social media marketing campaign without the plan. Take time to get educated on social networking sites. Not all sites were created for businesses. Also, once you learn a site, learn all the benefits of the site. Correcting mistakes is very frustrating and will lead to many business owners abandoning their plan and walking away from the strategy. Instead, learn the basics of setting up these site, understand the various options, and spend time engaging instead of fixing problems. You can find good online educational programs on the market that can 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 develop 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 keep up with all the benefits of each site. The very best approach would be to create one site, like Facebook, learn the details and properly implement. Create your Fan page, join groups, participate in events, and build relationships others. If you start up 12 at once, you will not be as active as well as your lack of participation could defeat your current goal. It’s better to have 1 or 2 2 completely utilized social media sites than 100 poorly designed and ignored platforms.

Social Media Marketing firm don’t matter- users of social media marketing won’t engage with individuals who don’t possess complete profiles. Given the popularity of Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, many people will find you before they find your site. If they find your site and you also have a pic of your logo, no pic, or very little personal information, then they will likely ignore you. Your profile can be your first impression, so be creative, be thorough, but most of all, 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 kind of media is a huge mistake and you will be ignored if you try out this on social media. Traditional a proven way marketing practices are a dying breed and trying 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 as an expert in the field in which you are practicing. For instance, if you are a Realtor, instead of promoting yourself and your site, educate homeowners on what they can do to market a house themselves. The truth is, only a small percentage of individuals will act on do-it-yourself content. By giving valuable information, you’ll become an expert about them. Then, when the reader is preparing to sell her or his house, they will most likely ask for your services.

Same method of communication- not everyone receives information through the same medium. Some people prefer to read, others like video, plus some people will be drawn to pictures on your site. The key is to mix up the way you post. If you to put it simply out a blog every day, your followers will become blind to your communication method. Change it up a little. Should you have a blog one 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 marketing activity. This doesn’t mean that you must 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.

Do it all yourself- did you ever have multiple email accounts? I used to have a hotmail, yahoo, and gmail account that I’d use to talk to people. Needing to log into multiple accounts each day to check the emails became annoying, time consuming, and ineffective. The truth is, it became to frustrating to get this done and I seldom used my email. However, once I learned to load most of my email accounts into Outlook, I was able to efficiently check and utilize the benefits of email. Exactly the same applies to social media. If you have to log into and log from 5 different social media sites each day, it will become tiresome and your degree of engagements on these sites will dwindle. Therefore, utilizing tools that may enable you to log into all of your social media makes up about interactions may be the easiest way to make sure that you consistently implement your social media marketing plan. Again, there are a few good all-in-one social media 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 plan for your business, you then absolutely should educate yourself on how to use the technology and find tools to work with 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 taking the steps listed above in this article, it will be possible to quickly and effectively create & implement your personal profitable social media marketing plan.