Social Media Marketing Pitfalls & How to Avoid Them
DANGER ZONES
Pitfall #1: Not having a complete and USEFUL website.
Pitfall #2: Define your audience/customer.
Pitfall #3: Inconsistent Content
As a small business owner, it’s imperative to have a plan to evaluate what’s working in your business and what’s not. Social media is a fantastic (and free!) way to share your business and expertise with others. If you started your small business more organically, as a hobby that you loved, your social media sharing likely flowed from that naturally. If you’re now operating as a business and seeing good engagement on posts and your followers are growing, you’re probably doing things right.
There’s not a specific formula to follow in posting to social media, but there are some practices to use and some to avoid. Let’s discuss a few pitfalls and how to avoid them.
Pitfall #1: Not having a complete and USEFUL website.
As a small business, your website is the home for your business. It must provide every piece of relevant and necessary information to potential clients or customers so they don’t have to work very hard to find it. Be sure that your site is easy to navigate and aesthetically pleasing. Ask a few friends to provide constructive feedback on how to improve your website. Ask a few of your colleagues to provide the same feedback as well. You can also ask us here at Flywheel! We provide a free assessment of what you are already doing with a few action steps you can take today to improve (for free!). We would love to assist you in fine-tuning your website.
All of your social media will link back to your website, so it needs to be useful, full of information and well executed. If you’ve ever used a Facebook link to go to a website and thought, “there’s nothing here I can’t find on Facebook,” then you need to find a way to add value on your website and provide information there you don’t provide elsewhere in order to engage the customer.
Action step: Offer a free download that’s relevant to your business or a coupon code in exchange for a potential customer’s e-mail address. Some ideas include:
A month of dinner ideas with recipes
A month of social media marketing prompts to post online
10 tips to organize your home, garage, bathroom, etc.
30 money saving ideas to start today
30 ways to earn a side income you can do now
Pitfall #2: Define your audience/customer. As a business owner, you must know your audience or your customer. Who are you hoping to attract as a customer? Your marketing needs to reflect that. You can have great content, but you also need a clear strategy. In order to have that, you have to define your audience.
Action step: Study your social media analytics to see where your followers are from, who is sharing your posts, the age ranges of people reading your content, are they male or female, married or single, kids or no kids. Drill down until you know as much as you can about your current audience. Is this the audience you were attempting to reach? If the answer is yes, great! If the answer is no, it’s time to assess how you got off-course and correct it.
Pitfall #3: Inconsistent Content Treat social media like an incoming producing activity, because it has to potential to produce income. Having a clear strategy for when you will post and how you will use that content to engage the customer is essential. The most effective social media influencers are the ones who show up consistently in your feed. They’re sharing the day-to-day with their audience. Their consistent and authentic content is what brings people back each day.
Action step: Grab a calendar and plan 14 days of content. Start by looking ahead to see what’s relevant to the actual calendar. For example, school is starting next month for most people. How does that fit into your small business? Planning your content ahead takes the guess work out of what you’ll share, and you can always pivot to other content as needed if something special comes up.
Write out 14 post prompts
Find the time of day that is best to post on each day for your 14 day calendar
Start designing, recording or writing your posts
Prep them for posting and finalize in advance
At Flywheel, we love to work with small businesses to strategize the best way to engage your customers. We want to help you succeed. Take one step today by clicking below to find out how we can help you with social media marketing, and more.