In the online marketing industry, social media marketing has been all the buzz for a while now. There is still a large amount of potential clients out there who (a) have not considered social media marketing but should and (b) have little idea that social media marketing can greatly impact their business in a positive way.
Let’s concentrate on those audiences and leave those who probably can’t benefit from a full-on social media campaign because social media marketing isn’t for everyone, no matter what marketers who specialize in it might say.
Let’s look at 3 key reasons why social media fails and how to avoid such pitfalls.
1. Wrong Place Wrong Time
As most people have no doubt heard of Facebook and Twitter as marketing platforms, there are hundreds of other platforms out there. The important aspect of this lesson is to ‘fish where the fish are’. In other words, make sure you have a well established, useful profile on those platforms where your most valued customers are ‘hanging out’ online.
2. Conversation Marketing
If you’re thinking that posting status updates and links back to your products, site or blog is what will win the hearts and minds of visitors, think again. The key word in Social Media Marketing is SOCIAL. Learn how to market without ‘marketing’ and get involved in conversations.
For example, if you go to a party at a friend’s house and Person A has a branded t-shirt while Person B strikes up a useful conversation about the same product on the branded t-shirt, you’re more likely to seek more information or buy a product based on the socialization than solely seeing a walking advertisement.
The other part of this equation is to stay in touch with your followers/customers. Let’s say for example that you’ve got a well-populated Facebook page and your followers are offering up negative comments and experiences about your products but you do little or nothing to address them.
This is probably one of the biggest snafus in social media that you can avoid. Staying in touch with your customers breaks down the invisible line between big, faceless business and business owners who truly care. Use negative comments to better your image — and even those people who see that you’re taking care of things, who might not have complained otherwise, will think highly of your brand that much more.
3. Your SEO Just May Depend On It
Without a doubt, search engines are utilizing social mentions of your company, brand, products to include you or represent you better in search results. Google, for example has a tab on the left side of the page that reads ‘updates’. People DO click this and you had better be showing up as being involved in social media in a more recent fashion.
Plus, Google’s business results are getting more attention from the search engines and a lot of the time Google is ranking those listings based on social media metrics and engagement, including reviews by actual customers.
Wrapping Up
One takeaway that is key is that social media isn’t for everyone and you should listen carefully to any agency that implements social media campaigns. Here at Overit we can tell you if your brand can benefit from social campaigns.
The remainder of the takeaways are above and you should take our advice seriously because often people who have a Facebook page or Twitter page may be savvy enough to set one up, but not savvy enough to capitalize on it in regards to ROI.
