Not to be a Debbie Downer, but all too often, educational and “how to” social media blog posts are approached from the “best practices” standpoint. But what if you – an extremely busy small business owner – don’t know that, despite doing all the good things you are doing, you’re also doing one or two things that are hurting your positive efforts? You’re putting time and energy into your social media, and you want it to help your small business not reflect poorly on it.
Let’s take a look at 4 common social media mistakes I see made by small business owners.
4 Common Social Media Mistakes made by Small Businesses
- Attempting to create a presence on a social media platform… without having the necessary content Most common are small business owners who want to have a presence on Instagram, YouTube, or Pinterest, and they aren’t producing (or don’t have) images or videos for use on Instagram, videos for YouTube, or (lots of) images and website links for Pinterest. It’s critical to learn what it takes to make each individual social platform successful before trying to establish a presence on that social media platform. It doesn’t matter if it’s a “popular” platform or even if it’s a social media platform where your customers hang out. If you don’t have the type of original content that it takes to do a good job on that social media platform, it’s not the right fit for your small business.
- Being All Promotional, All The Time No one wants to be sold to all of the time. No one wants to engage with a bunch of salesy posts, either. In order to get people to pay attention to your small business on social media, you need to mix in non-promotional content that’s relevant and complementary to your ideal customers and your small business.
- Not Engaging I’m regularly shocked at how many small businesses don’t respond to tweets, comments, and private messages from others. Acknowledging and replying to others’ comments is the easiest engagement to come by! Also, you’re sending a negative message to your customers and potential customers if you choose to ignore posts, messages, and comments from others. Plus, with just about every social media platform having an algorithm now, algorithms love you more if you are getting users to engage with your business’ posts. So why would you ever pass up the chance at engaging with others?
- Not Advertising on Facebook Facebook purposely reduced the organic (unpaid) Reach of Facebook Business Page posts. If you want to get your most important content seen on Facebook, you’ll likely need to put some targeted money behind it. The good news is, you can spend very little money each day to advertise.
Make sure you aren’t shooting yourself in the foot with any of these social media No Nos for your small business’ social media strategy.
Hey Liz! Great post, really. I’d like to add another common mistake that I have seen small businesses do. Some of them mess up their bios on social media platforms really bad! No profile picture or a weird- unprofessional header just gives a really bad first impression. Audiences, consciously or sub-consciously, do pay attention to such details. This must definitely be taken care of!