Buying Fans/Likes/Followers The more individuals like your page the more popular it becomes and the more likely it is for people to see it. The idea behind buying likes and followers comes from trying to game the social media marketing engine into thinking a page is more popular than it really is, and thereby giving that page more exposure because of its popularity. To deal with this, social media algorithms have incorporated algorithms that track a page’s interactions with its followers, meaning that buying likes is simply wasting your marketing budget on nothing. Spreading yourself too thin There are dozens of social media marketing sites on the internet and communities are divided between them. A community on Twitter may have similar members to a community on Facebook, but neither of these may have similar members within a community on Pinterest, which may be made of completely different people with the same likes. You should aim to reach as much of your target audience as possible, but should be aware that you can’t cover ALL social media outlets. Budget your time with the channels that have the highest concentration of your target demographic. Thinking of Social Media in a Bubble A social media account isn’t something that exists extant to your marketing strategy. Rather social media engagement and content sharing should be built in to your marketing strategy. It’s easy to think about social media channels as ends onto themselves, but the reality of it is that they should exist to funnel desirable traffic to their source pages and to aid in the SEO viability of these pages through shares from their followers. Don’t leave it out of your marketing strategy considerations. Overselling Don’t try to sell to your users too overtly. Over the last decade, internet users have developed an adverse reaction to being sold to. They don’t like clicking on ads and they don’t like being pandered to in order to close a sale. Their cynicism is an issue you need to get around in your marketing. By trying to sell to them directly you are more than likely to drive away your conversions than to increase them. Remember that selling to a person is more efficient when that person develops a bond with you. Ignoring Customer Reactions Your customers are what drive your business. Ignoring them isn’t likely to end very well, especially when it comes to things that can affect your brand perception with the public. Always follow up on tweets or comments by customers and use your social media outreach to get in touch with the commenters directly and resolve the issues they may have. This increases the level of trust the average customer has in your company and reflects on it in a positive light. Justin Morgan of DMG explains “Because I work almost entirely in the dental marketing world, my clients (dentists) have very little time to respond to their patients, which usually results in a wildfire of problems down the road. Reputation management can be a big help for business owners in heavily trafficked industries.” Put in the Time and Effort Marketing is always going to be a work in progress. You will always have to be improving your marketing methods and developing your ways to engage the customer constantly. It’s a lot easier to learn from the common marketing mistakes of others than to make your own since you won’t penalize your business for those mistakes. Keep these tips in mind when you’re developing your future marketing campaigns.
