5 Social Media Mistakes That Could Cripple Your Business

By Corey Graham 2.0

Today, whenever you hear about social media and business, it usually tends to be in a positive light. Tech savvy marketers and entrepreneurs are all evangelizing the benefits of social media. However, I wanted to take a look at the mistakes that could cripple your business.

Shouting at Your Potential and Current Customers

This is one I put high on the list because it is fundamental mistake most people make with implementing their social media marketing. Social media is about conversation and it works best when you are being conversational. The humans beings you are trying to reach enjoy good thoughtful interaction. Using social media to blast persons with your marketing messages and abusing their inbox with a constant influx of sales copy type emails is a quick way to erode the possibility of having a building a long term successful relationship with your customers.

This is following on from the point above. I know you might not intentionally set out insult your audience, however if you are not taking to time to listen and understand your audience you might very likely underestimating their intelligence i.e. their opinions and ideas do not matter. If you are doing that, then you are very likely to insult them as you try to engage them through social media. Insulted people are bad for business.

This is important because each social network / medium has its own peculiarities. In some cases it might mean there might be a different standard of communications certain types of messages and in others it might mean you have a different type of person interacting with you on the different networks. Whatever it is, its important to understand the difference and communicate accordingly.

Now this is a shortcut, but don't overdo it. Interacting with human like a robot is simply not going to cut it. There are a few situations where an automated message would be extremely helpful to everyone involved. However if you overuse automated messages, it can easily hurt you, and very badly. The worse case with this situation is the social network flags you as a spammer and deletes you.

People new to social media get carried away trying to attract new friends and followers not realising that their current list is where the gold mind is really located. The people already on your list can attract many new followers / followers by sharing with others how great you are. The thing is though; if you are not paying attention to them and making sure they think you are great! It takes just one of them to start the movement! Work smart!

Hope this opens your eyes to managing your social media marketing strategy more effectively.