How to Avoid These 7 Common SOCIAL MEDIA Mistakes

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

Creating raving Motivational Content who sing your praises to others is both the least expensive & most productive form of advertising. A lot of people tune out traditional means of advertising. Only one 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 will make a purchasing decision in line with the input of friends and family.

Social media marketing provides 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 venture out each week. YouTube has over 100 million views each day. The potential for your message to be spread by raving fans is more frequent today through social media than any other time in the annals of business. Can your organization afford not to participate in this marketing revolution?

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

I’ll figure it out as I go- the largest time waster is going right into a social media marketing campaign without any plan. Take the time to get educated on social networking sites. Not all sites are designed for businesses. Also, once you learn a site, learn all of the benefits of the site. Correcting mistakes is very frustrating and will result in many companies abandoning their plan and walking from the strategy. Instead, learn the fundamentals of setting up 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 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 one time. But the problem with this particular 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 facts and properly implement. Create your Fan page, join groups, take part in events, and build relationships others. If you set up 12 at once, you will not be as active as well as your insufficient 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.

Profiles don’t matter- users of social media marketing won’t engage with people who don’t have complete profiles. Given the popularity of Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, many people will find you before they find your website. If they find your website and you also have a pic of one’s logo, no pic, or hardly any personal information, then they will most 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 largest stumbling block for most beginning marketers. After they have an audience, they feel compelled to broadcast their message to the masses. This sort of media is a huge mistake and you will be ignored if you try this on social media. Traditional a proven way marketing practices certainly are a dying breed and attempting to imitate these ineffective methods on a fresh medium will yield exactly the same failed results. Rather than selling your product, educate the masses and establish yourself as an expert in the field in which you are practicing. For example, if you are a Realtor, instead of promoting yourself as well as your site, educate homeowners on what they can do to sell a house themselves. The truth is, only a small percentage of individuals will act on do-it-yourself content. By giving valuable information, you will become an expert about them. Then, when the reader is ready to sell her or his house, they will probably ask for your services.

Same method of communication- not everyone receives information through exactly 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 how you post. If you to put it simply out a blog each day, your followers will become blind to your communication method. Change it out up a little. For those who have a blog 1 day, then put up a simple 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 mean that you must make posts multiple times each day. But if your goal is to make 30 Facebook posts monthly, you’ll find it’s better 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 truly 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 truth is, it became to time consuming 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 off of 5 different social media sites each day, it will become tiresome and your degree of engagements on these sites will dwindle. Therefore, utilizing tools which will allow you to log into your entire social media makes up about interactions may be the best way to make sure that you consistently implement your social media plan. Again, there are several good all-in-one social media dashboards that will enable you to streamline your accounts and social media efforts.
In summary, if you are a small business owner looking to create a social media marketing plan for your business, you then absolutely should educate yourself on how to utilize the technology and find tools to assist you in the daily utilization. If you don’t know how to create a house and you don’t possess a hammer, that house isn’t likely to get built. By firmly taking the steps listed above in this post, it is possible to quickly and effectively create & implement your own profitable social media plan.