Discover the social marketing mistakes small businesses need to avoid for better marketing

For any small business a productive marketing plan is a great and cheap way to promote your business, but get to wrong and you could alienate more people then gain.

Avoid self promotion

Of course we don’t mean you should not promote your company but the nature and wording you use is important to avoid turning people away.

In real terms, no customer cares if you have just “made a sale” so avoid telling people how much money you have just made, it doesn’t benefit any of your customers so why should they care, you don’t check out Tescos latest sales reports before buying your monthly food shopping! instead let people know what you can offer them and why it may benefit them, provide useful content, create posts that offer useful insights into your product range or services.

Promote the benefits not your features

This piece of advise goes back to the dawn of any sales training and is still something that should be followed in digital marketing today.

Remember the saying “people don’t by features, they buy benefits” and this is true in your social marketing, tailor your tweets or blog posts to highlight the benefits of your products or service and avoid trying to tell everyone about what you do, tell them how your service or product will benefit them and they will listen.

Avoid pointless waffle

Many small businesses under estimate what they say in social marketing, their approach is often one of, tweeting something is better then nothing.

But this is a sure way to start getting people to unfollow you, people tend to react to much more infrequent yet useful information then endless tweets about what the web owner may have had for lunch or what they saw out the office window. although there is quite a benefit to coming across as human and not always about company promotion getting the level right will eventually start getting reactions rather then simply bored followers.

A simple way to test what your about to tweet, blog or upload a link to be liked, we call the “pub test”, basically before you press that send button, think about what you have just typed and then think what reaction you would get saying exactly the same thing to your mates down the pub, would they listen or start looking around for anyone else to listen too.

Small business owners need to start using social media as a firm of networking rather then a pure sales tool, get the balance right and your social marketing will start to take off naturally.

Your not actually friends with the famous

There seems to be a new pattern emerging where a small business will name drop and @someone famous in a number of tweets, but don’t forget everyone can see what your up to.

Every time you tweet a famous person in the hope you think they will either reply, retweet or that you are now their new best friend, your simply showing every other follower of you that your desperate for someone to listen and in turn your reputation can start taking a knock.

Make sure you brand all your social marketing

Every small business should know just how important your image online is to your business, getting your web design right is first, but now you need to get your social media pages looking right.

It’s even easier now to upload and change your Twitter and Facebook background, avatar and header images, but don’t scrimp on this, often you can ave more people looking at your twitter avatar on any given day ten your website.

So brand yourself, match your website style to your social media pages, upload proper sized header images and backgrounds, poor images or images that look cheap reflect on you and your small business quality of service.

Check out our header design service if you want to improve your social media impact.