4 Critical Mistakes You're Making on Social Media

1. Treating Social Media as a One Way Street

The power of social media is in its ability to connect people. You want to create the feel of an intimate back-and-forth conversation between you and your prospects rather than shouting into a crowd. Instead of focusing on pushing out loads of content, aim to create opportunities for dialogue with your customers. A conversation that builds trust and establishes relationships. People rarely do business with strangers, they do business with people they know, like, and trust.

2. Jumping Straight into the Sale

Selling follows the same rules as dating. You wouldn’t ask a person you’re interested in to marry you on the first day you meet them. Similarly, customers are not interested in buying your product the first day they encounter it. On social media, focus on providing value consistently and with no strings attached. Following that, create multiple touchpoints for communication with your customers. Nurture the relationship; use lots of empathy statements to make them feel understood and cared about before you ask for the sale.

3. Marketing Without a Strategy

Your social media marketing should fit into a broader content marketing and promotion strategy. You want each piece of content that you post to have an objective that drives toward a certain goal. These objectives include creating awareness of your brand, product, or service, encouraging engagement, email list building, lead conversion, etc. If your social marketing is not tied to your overall marketing goals then you cannot measure its effectiveness and you might end up wasting time and money.

4. Treating Social Media Marketing as a Single Discipline

It’s actually composed of 4 equally important parts:

Monitoring and Listening - Monitor, listen and respond to customer inquiries, feedback, and important trends and topics in your industry.

Influencing - establish authority in your industry by posting and sharing relevant and valuable content. You want to use your content to provide BIG value to your audience. This value is important because it sets you apart as an expert within your industry.

Networking - Engage and build relationships with valuable brands and influencers in your industry. This creates mutually beneficial relationships and draws more followers to your brand.

Social Selling - Connect a seeking audience with your products and services. This is the part of your social media strategy where you’re running ads to content pieces, lead magnets, and your products. This is where you might be tempted to jump in on day one, but now you know that there are other important pieces of the puzzle that fit into a successful social media strategy.

A thought for you

This quote from the wildly popular book “Atomic Habits” has been challenging me over the past few days:

"Happiness is simply the absence of desire... Happiness is not about the achievement of pleasure (which is joy or satisfaction), but about the lack of desire. It arrives when you have no urge to feel differently. Happiness is the state you enter when you no longer want to change your state."

Stay happy!

A.M