We are all sometimes guilty of making social media marketing mistakes, but what exactly are they? The list could be pretty long, but lets just focus on the few main ones.

Don’t start something and not finish it!

A half-finished profile page with incomplete details and a mismatched design will only give the wrong impression to any potential customer. If it’s March now and your latest update was wishing everyone a Merry Christmas, what signals do you think this sends? Transfer your attention to detail from your crafting to your online promotion and get creative with cover photographs and profile images. Use the same colours, matching logo and type of photos that you have on your website to ensure that your branding is seamless. A polished, professional social media page will create the impression that you’re serious about your business and dedicated to every aspect of it.

Quality over quantity

Many people make the mistake of taking on too much and doing worse because of it.  You don’t have to be anywhere and everywhere when it comes to social media – be choosey and pick which channels will work best for you and your business. If you’re unsure whether or not you’ll be able to fully engage with online users on a particular medium, don’t sign up for it. Limiting yourself to two or three social media channels will allow you to concentrate your efforts. After all, it’s better to be brilliant at one thing than average at lots. For creative business I would always recommend visual social media (Instagram, Pinterest), Facebook because despite its possible demise in recent times, it’s still a place where a lot of people are, YouTube if you are into tutorials or want to show people videos from behind the scenes of your business. Twitter is increasingly becoming visual too, so it’s worth considering, especially if you want to connect with people in your creative niche.

It’s not all about you

How many times have you become disenchanted with a Facebook page or Twitter account due to overload? This is another of those crucial social media marketing mistakes, we often forget that it’s not all about us!

Constantly bombarding your followers with your new creations and solely focusing on your own goings-on will bore your audience. Present your followers with a range of content that is of value to them, even if it does not immediately benefit your sales. Give a little and get a lot in the long-term. It’s proven that any potential customer needs to somehow connect with you about 7 times, before they purchase. If they see a story about your background or how you started your creative business, they will be interested. After that they might see a little tutorial you’ve posted on YouTube and from that they will probably go to your website to read your blog. If then they see a post about a last minute space available on your sewing workshop, they will book without hesitation. There is a whole psychology behind this and whether you are doing this naturally (e.g.promoting yourself indirectly) or more methodically – it does work!

Be consistent

Another example of social media marketing mistakes, is not being consistent enough. When someone signs up to follow your page, signs up to your newsletter or follows you on social media, they often anticipate your digital presence to be a consistent fixture in their social media bubble. Posting sporadically and failing to uphold this expectation will only irritate them, leaving them feeling neglected and disillusioned with your brand.

Plan ahead

Decide how often your want to post across your social media platforms and stick to it. If you are not sure ‘how often’ there are whole loads of statistics available on this, but I would recommend to start with you. Ask yourself what is realistic, what can you physically do in a week, month or year? There is no point setting yourself up to fail, wanting to write a blog post every single day, but once or twice a month is more realistic. Take an empty diary for a week or a month and map out your strategy. Once you have it, try to stick to it for at least a month, review it and monitor what works or what doesn’t.

Review your social media strategy regularly

Each social media usually has some sort of analytics, where you can find out your reach and get more of an understanding how your audience reacts to your updates. Check your social media analytics at least once a month and review your strategy accordingly. It’s amazing what you can find! The post that you thought was the most brilliant ever, might not have got as many ‘likes’, impressions or shares as the one that you didn’t even think would be much good.

And since I’m getting you to check each social media analytics, I would also like to encourage you to check out your website google analytics. So far we’ve been talking about social media mistakes, but the biggest mistake (possibly) is to spend time on something that doesn’t actually bring any traffic to your website. And traffic means increased visibility, which means more shares, likes, comments and of course more sales. So, next time when you are looking at your google analytics, check out the website traffic sources and then social media referrals. You can clearly see which social media brings you the most traffic and which one is worth focusing on.

I think we have only scratched the surface of social media marketing mistakes, so which ones do you think we should avoid? What did you find that works for you or doesn’t? I love to know, so leave me a comment.

Magdalena

Magdalena Marsden
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