4 Mistakes Small Businesses make in Social Media Marketing
“Why is it not advisable to target all social media platforms?” is a question rarely asked by small business owners.
All the social media platforms have their own target audience and your business has its own target audience. Obviously, all the social media platforms do not have your target audience.
Therefore, it is important to identify the right social media platform before investing money in social media marketing. Not identifying the right social media platform is just one of the mistakes made by small business owners.
In the last few years, Social Media Marketing has become an important tool of promotion for small and medium businesses. As per a 2017 survey, 77.6 percent of SMBs say they use social media in their marketing strategy and 32 percent of SMBs seriously invest in social media marketing. (source)
In addition to above, 70% of small businesses plan to increase their social media spending this year.
The above numbers definitely look encouraging for social media marketing. Social Media Marketing is turning into a preferred medium of business promotion for small business owners.
Undoubtedly, the number of small business owners adopting social media marketing as a serious tool for advertisement and promotion is only expected to go higher in 2018.
While most of the businesses today are on social media, many of them are not able to use social media marketing to their advantage. As mentioned above 77.6% SMBs are on Social Media but only 32% are using social Media marketing seriously.
Social Media Marketing has its pitfalls. Most of the Small businesses confuse having a presence on social media to promoting on social media and that is just the start, small businesses (due to limited budget and time) make bigger mistakes when it comes to social media promotions.
In this blog, I have listed the five common mistakes small businesses make during social media marketing.
Here is the list:
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Advertising on every platform:
Every social media platform has a different user base. For example, users on Facebook are looking for entertainment and fun related content. They are there to pass their time by looking at updates posted by their friends or families.
The same user, when logged into LinkedIn, is there for professional networking.
There is a stark difference in between how both the platforms can be used in social media marketing. While Facebook is a good social media platform for B2C Campaigns, LinkedIn is a good platform for B2B Campaigns.
The first mistake all business owners do is, they set up profiles on all social media platforms. The move backfires as every social media platform has a different user base. Also, registering on all the platforms and sharing the same content on all the platform makes them a Business which does not understand the social media platform it is promoting on.
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Confusing Social Media Presence with Social Media Marketing:
It takes less than 15 minutes to set up a social media platform. If a small business owner has to set up a profile on the 5 most famous social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube and snap chat), the time spent should not be more than 2 hours.
Once you have set up a profile on all the social media platforms, what next? The next logical step is producing content for all the platforms which involves creating content which engages users and turns them into your follower.
This is where most of the small businesses falter. They do not have the human resource or energy to invest in all the different platforms.
For them establishing a social media profile was the start of their social media campaign. But they fail to take the campaigns any further than step one due to lack of resources or time.
In the world of social media marketing, the more the merrier does not hold true.
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Focussing too much on self-promotion:
The ultimate aim of any business promotion is to generate leads or direct sales. Although there is nothing wrong with having an end goal as sales, too much focus on sales from day one leads to social media followers deserting your business’s social media profile or page.
One of the basic fundamentals of any social media strategy is to start by creating awareness. Small Businesses forget the fundamentals and from day one, start focussing on their ads, offers and discounts (promotion material). This creates a disconnect in between their target audience and their social media strategy.
The target audience is on social media to have fun or build a network or watch/read content. To reach them, the business must focus on feeding them with what they are looking for on internet rather than feeding them with content which is not irrelevant.
For example, a prospective customer on Facebook might be looking at educational tips whereas your business might be busy posting summertime course offers.
Your content will neither get a like or a comment and will eventually die a slow death on social media.
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Missing the “Creativity” factor:
There is so much noise on social media that it is difficult to raise your hand and tell everyone that your business too is there on social media.
How can small businesses get noticed on social media?
Small Businesses have limited budget, so they cannot hire the super expensive PR Teams to create that awesome content for them.
They themselves have limited time to contribute to social media platforms. So how do they succeed with so many constraints? One of the key factors to their success can by creating “Out of Box “content.
You can use free tools like Canva, Piktochart to create attractive banners, infographics and other types of content to create content which is creative and engaging.
Once the user identifies your business as a brand which posts amazing content, they will keep demanding more.
An average user spends 45 minutes per day on YouTube and 35 minutes every day on Facebook.
If you combine all the time a person spends during their lifetime on social media, it comes to 5 years of their lifetime.
Now that’s a lot of time. In fact, the time spent by a person on social media during their lifetime is more than the time they spend socializing, eating/drinking.
You have the number of users on social media and they are spending ample amount of time on social media. All you need is a sound strategy to promote your small business.