From my own personal experience I know that social media marketing is an excellent way to increase your businesses exposure and to generate website visitors, leads and money. However, there are also many common mistakes that people often make when engaging in social media marketing, if you find that you are making any of these, just remember it’s never too late to fix your social media marketing and make it much more effective.

Not Engaging Your Audience

When your audience makes a comment on something, shares or asks a question, don’t leave it too long to respond as this is an opportunity for real engagement with your audience. If you utilize a monitoring service or employ someone to monitor your social media profiles, have them inform you of ongoing conversations and opportunities for engagement. Or alternatively check yourself every few hours, the important thing is to engage and that engagement should be from you.

Poor Completed Profiles

I see this a lot especially on LinkedIn, incomplete profiles make your business look either sloppy, lazy or fake. If you want to be taken seriously and want to generate results, fill out your profile completely, include a good profile picture (of you on LinkedIn), your company logo/banner and information so that you can be easily contacted outside of social media, on your website or telephone for instance.

Not Focusing on Follower Quality

Some people make the mistake of focusing on the quantity of followers rather than the quality. You want to concern yourself with finding followers who are potential customers or who can refer to onward to potential customers. This is the reason that those people that buy followers are simply wasting their money, followers need to be real people that can potentially do your business some good.

Not Posting Regular, Relevant Updates

If you aren’t active on social media posting things that resonate with your audience, then you’re not going to get any real traction. If you plan to be successful with social media marketing it takes perseverance and patience, so post those updates often and regular and capture your audience’s attention and then keep it.

Not Choosing Your Social Media Platforms Wisely

When I first started networking long before Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter existed I was taught that you network in the places your customers go, This still holds true today in that you don’t need to be on every single social media platform, instead simply be on the social media platforms your audience love.

I also believe that it’s much, much better to be very active on one or two social media channels rather than weak on all of them. My own personal choice is LinkedIn and Twitter, I understand both of these, I have many followers and I know how to generate thousands of website visitors and multiple inquires weekly from each platform. Perhaps you can get similar results by focusing on your efforts on one or two social media channels rather than trying to master all of them.

Not Automating Some Tasks

My Twitter account is extremely active, it has a tweet being sent out roughly every fifteen to thirty minutes, these tweets are all automated which means that I have set it up once and I reap the benefit every single day. On top of this I also use one of the many social media monitoring tools which allows me to login and see who has replied to a tweet, or has sent me a message and how each tweet has performed. This then allows me to interact with my audience, reply to them and to really get down and personal with them and all it takes is ten to fifteen minutes two or three times per day. It’s possible to automate posts to almost all social media channels just make sure when using such tools that you don’t come across as too robotic.

Interacting Personally

Every chance you get, it’s important to make spur-of-the-moment updates that are relevant to your business and your goals. This will make you look more real in the eyes of your followers and it also makes social media fun.

Not Personalizing Messages for the Channel

Each social media platform is different from the others, even if you audience is the same you should tailor your message to the platform so that you maximize audience engagement. For instance on LinkedIn I love to post full articles as I find that these really engage my audience and help establish me as a influencer, yet on Facebook I only post snippets that lead through to my blog. By personalizing your message for each channel you also come across as a professional and instead of sending the same message, potentially to the same audience members which make them feel spammed, you will come across as fresh and engaging even if it’s the same news item being discussed.

Using social media to market your business is a proven technique to get more customers, make more sales, and increase your bottom line, but only if you avoid these common mistakes. Work on one social media platform at a time and make the improvements needed to get it back on the right track so that you make your social media marketing profitable for your business. Oh and remember you can check my Twitter and LinkedIn accounts account to see exactly what I am doing and see the successes I am experiencing.