When researching how to grow your small business or brand through social media there is a staggering amount of opinion available and you can easily disappear down a digital rabbit hole of information; some good, some not so good or not remotely relevant to your brand. Here are some tips on how NOT to grow your business on social media:
Have Zero Strategy
Social media is not as easy as it looks, especially for business accounts dealing with the constantly changing social media platform algorithms that can drive you to near madness! So, this should be the very first issue to address.
Here at Pick & Mix Marketing, we can help you develop a clear (and actionable) social media strategy that should form the foundation of your business’s marketing campaign, fast-tracking your growth to greater heights. Your business needs to have a well thought out game plan, a clear set of actions, milestones, end goals, or a framework to gain clarity on how you’ll run your social media marketing campaigns.
By using a carefully mapped out strategy, successful businesses have a clear guiding compass of what they should do, how they should do things, and when they should start pulling triggers.
Forget to Delete Your Old Social Media Accounts
These may be accounts that you did not fully invest in at the time when they were created and will affect your brand profile as you now fully commit to growing your business online. You will need to make the decision whether to either pick up these accounts if you already have a sizeable following that you do not want to lose or, if not, then delete the accounts and start from scratch.
Leave Out Important Business Details
Start with your business listing on Google which will help with the SEO of your brand. If you already have social media accounts set up for your business, then it is a good idea to ensure that all your details are up-to-date, complete and accurate. Make sure your business location is correct (on Google maps) and your address, phone number, website address and business opening hours are all current. This will help direct and grow traffic to the platforms that will showcase your business.
Fail to Understand Your Audience
This may seem obvious, but we have all seen inconsistent, badly written social media feeds and quickly scroll on! The most successful feeds are considered, aesthetically pleasing, have a strong message about the brand and clear action points. A consistent message across all platforms, honed to each individual platform, is the key to success. It’s worth writing a mission statement and sticking to it. This starts with who your target audience is and which platforms you want to use to reach them?
Instagram is perfect for photos and its direction is increasingly upping the video and reels content, Facebook is for more personal posts to encourage engagement and LinkedIn for business-to-business interaction and group discussion. Your brand voice is important, audiences are not interested in the humble (or not so humble) brag anymore but are responding more to businesses who talk about their values and businesses who put a personal spin on their posts. Some of the most popular accounts use heartfelt language that is easy to engage with and understand.
Talking about your journey, the obstacles you faced as a business owner whilst growing your brand and spotlighting your team are great ways of creating a lively and authentic feed.
Ignore Your Followers
You’ve taken great pains to set up your accounts, upload images of your products, scheduled your posts but all of this is pointless if you are not on top of engaging with your followers. Accounts should be checked numerous times a day to ensure you are responding to all comments, positive or negative. Also, familiarise yourself with how to hide unwanted comments on platforms.
Look into setting up automated replies to messages acknowledging that your business has received their enquiry and you will be in touch as soon as possible.
Do you think we’ve missed anything? Leave us comment down below!
If you would like to have an initial conversation with us to discuss how we can help you achieve your social media aims, then please contact us at info@pickandmixms.co.uk or call us on 01904 863 511.