Today more than ever, social media is an easy and very effective way to bring more awareness to your business and can help you bring in more customers. This is why it’s essential to get it right the first time. If you want to create content that is engaging, establishes a connection, and keeps people coming back then keep reading so you know some blunders to avoid.
Not Engaging Enough
Social media has become increasingly popular as a way for customers to reach out to get support, have their burning questions answered, and pay compliments or to get more info before they decide to buy. If customer service is essential to your business, then this is one area you do not want to neglect.
If a potential or current customer can get the information they need, and fast, it makes the customer feel valued and more loyal and more likely to sing your praises all over the place and less likely to find another business to spend their money with.
Missing Important Connections
Not building genuine connections with your followers is another significant blunder to avoid. There are several ways to do this, but one of the most important is to make sure to keep your social media very well rounded. You're running a business, and of course, your main focus should be keeping your customers updated and informed, but you should also be sharing other information that your followers will take an interest in, things that are not business related.
For example, you could share sweet inspirational videos or memes or things going on in the community that is inspirational or a cause that your company believes in and supports etc. Showing that your business cares just as much about what’s going on in the community as you do about making a profit will really set a good tone about what your company represents.
A study titled, Meaningful Brands conducted by an agency called Havas, concluded that there is a stable relationship between a brands performance and its meaningfulness. Basically, a business with a cause will outperform a company without one.
Not Being Authentic
When following accounts on social media, people have a choice. There are so many accounts out there trying to grab users attention, and realistically, most are only going to give their valuable time and attention to accounts that matter to them.
Ask yourself, am I creating and posting content that will keep them coming back and is share-worthy? Or am I continually barraging my followers with ads and marketing gimmicks?
Authenticity is everything and one of the techniques that will help your social media shine above the others. A better strategy is to provide content that is relatable, authentic and contains a more organic message.
Not Letting Your Personality Shine
Personality is everything when using social media to market your product, brand, or business. You want to remain professional but also want to be relatable. What better way to stay relatable than by sharing life experiences, funny things that happened to you, fascinating life stories or just your thoughts.
Chances are, some of your followers have had the exact same thing or similar thing happen to them. Sharing shows you have a human side and not just a business side. Sharing about yourself builds trust and helps to develop a social media relationship that becomes harder to break as your followers become vested in you and your daily life.
Not to say you have to put all yourself out there, you want to still remain focused on your brand but finding a balance between business and relatability will help you build better bonds with your customers or clients.
Brushing Off Bad Reviews
With consumers having so many choices, it’s no wonder it's becoming more common for customers to turn to reviews as a way to make informed decisions before going with your product or service. If a potential customer sees lousy review after bad review, chances are, they will take their business elsewhere.
With that being said, a business may not have 100% positive feedback, but that usually will not deter most customers if the majority of the reviews are good and positive. The best way to always receive positive reviews is to be sure you are offering quality products, services or information, and still, provide excellent customer service. If for some reason a customer finds the need to leave negative feedback, it’s always best to reach out and find out why that customer is not happy, and be prepared to offer a few solutions.
A disgruntled, unhappy customer may not only leave you a bad review that may persuade other potential customers to go to one of your competitors but also, you will be losing any repeat business from that customer. Often, if a customer is unhappy, the fact that you reached out and tried to rectify the problem may be the difference between losing or gaining a repeat customer despite having an issue in the first place.
Customers know businesses are not always perfect, mistakes happen, but it will be the way you handle those issues that will set your business apart from the rest.
Mixing Personal and Business
Some people forget there is a fine line between business and personal and often the two don’t mix well together. In this day and age, you need to keep your personal accounts just as professional as your business accounts. Some people spend lots of time and money building up their small business only to post something politically incorrect. Which ends up costing them by losing clients and sometimes worse, going viral for the wrong reasons.These are just some of the main things you can do to avoid social media regrets. As long as you realise when conducting business online, customers want to know they can trust what you are marketing to them and that will only come from a place of trust, trust in you and your brand. Be confident, upbeat and as authentic as you can, and you will have yourself a social media platform you will be proud of with no regrets.
