With so many social media marketing options available, you’d think that creating a strategy for your small business would be easy. In reality, finding the right social media marketing strategy for small business ventures can be much more challenging.
Without a doubt, social media influence on society has become much more evident over the past decade. However, all brands are jumping on the bandwagon given its wide reach. That means there’s so much noise out there, making it tricky to decide which strategies will work best. Here are five social media marketing strategies that you should avoid if you want to succeed with your small business:
1. Relying on ROI to make your decision
When you’re creating a social media marketing strategy for small business ventures, there’s one thing that you shouldn’t be looking out for the amount of revenue you stand to make as a result of that strategy.
Unfortunately, people often base their decisions on whether or not they’ll generate a profit. This is a huge mistake because it often leads to shortsighted marketing strategies. Instead, you should base your decisions on what benefits your brand the most, regardless of whether it drives sales. If a particular strategy increases awareness of your business and reaches the right audience, then it has done its job. This will ultimately lead to more sales in the long run.
2. Posting for the sake of posting every day
Many people make the mistake of thinking they need to post on social media at least once daily. The result is that they post for the sake of posting instead of posting content that their audience will appreciate. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t post daily. You should be posting several times a week on the days your target audience is likely to be online. You just need to be sure that each post is valuable so that people read them.
That said, finding the most creative ways to promote your business on social media is best. For instance, what are your audience’s other interests besides your product? How can you make your brand relevant to their lifestyle? Work these into your brand identity guide to ensure that your social media posts are on point.
3. Using automation too much
While automation can be an excellent social media marketing strategy for small business ventures, don’t rely too much on them. The thing is, automated posts don’t allow your audience to engage with your brand. Instead, they appear as standard posts that don’t encourage comments or shares.
As a result, they don’t help you build a relationship with your customers, and they don’t drive engagement. They also make you look like a spammer, which can lose followers in the long run. If you’re going to use automation, you need to be very selective about what content is published on autopilot. Otherwise, you’re just wasting your time.
4. Being overly reliant on tools
As you’re building your social media marketing strategy, you’ll probably come across many tools that promise to make your life easier. The thing is, though, you should be very careful about using these tools. After all, some of them are useful, but many of them are just gimmicky and won’t add any real value to your business.
In short, only use the ones that will actually benefit your business. Also, ensure that you’ll know how to make the taste manually if those tools don’t work out for you.
5. Focusing on just one platform
Many people mistake focusing all of their attention on one social media platform and then ignoring the rest. However, you can’t expect to get the same amount of attention on each platform.
Instead of focusing on one, diversify and spread your effort among several different platforms. That way, you can build a relationship with an even larger audience and increase the engagement you receive as a result.
6. Posting the same thing on platforms
One popular social media marketing strategy for small business ventures is using a management app to post across all platforms. This step assumes that the strategy on one platform will also work on the others.
However, this move could lead to posts that don’t resonate with your audience. As a result, you don’t see results and look like an amateur. For instance, social media marketing strategies on Instagram or Facebook may not work on LinkedIn or Twitter. You need to understand what works and what doesn’t in each platform.
7. Treating social media posts as ads
Many people looking for how to promote business on social media for free often turn to posts as a way to advertise. They pepper their feeds with “buy now!” and “click here!” posts that don’t add any value to their audience.
As a result, people start to ignore these posts, which means they don’t work. In fact, these types of posts have the opposite effect and can put your audience off from buying from your business. That said, it’s best to put the value at the forefront of your social media posts. Then, reserve the sales spiel for creating effective Facebook ads.
The Bottom line
Looking at the approaches mentioned above, one can see how well social media marketing strategy for small business ventures can quickly take a wrong turn. In the end, remember these simple tips to make social media work for you:
- Know the audience of each social media platform and tailor your posts accordingly.
- Don’t think of social media as an instant highway to sales. Instead, treat it as a two-way road between you and your audience.
- Social media posts are all about value. Hard-selling your products day in and day out can be the fastest way to lose followers.
Given the nature of social media, new trends will come and go. But by taking these core concepts to heart, you can take advantage of any platform and not waste time and money while growing your business.
