Social Media Sins & Therapy

Posted by Julie on May 2, 2012 in Blog | 0 comments

Social Media Marketing Sins

You’re a small business owner, and you use social media.  You post to Facebook, Tweet, participate on Google+, and occasionally use LinkedIn.  But you find it difficult to get people to Like your Facebook Page or engage with you on Twitter.  Why?  More than likely, you’re committing social media sins.

There are several of them.  And new ones show up all the time.  It’s OK, take a deep breath.  The first step is awareness.  There’s something like 5 other steps, but this isn’t therapy, so we’re not going to worry about those.  We’ll skip straight to the end, and tell you how to “right” your social media wrong.

Sin #1: Post ONLY information about you, your business, your products, and being overly promotional

If you’ve spent any time on social media, you have seen these offenders.  You probably know A LOT about what they sell.  You find yourself saying, “Ugh, I don’t care that you’re having another 10% Tuesday sale.”  Yeah, you know the ones.

The important question – are you guilty?  You may be if you answer yes to ANY of the following:

• Did your last 5 Facebook status updates include 2 or more promotions about your business? Note:  a promotion is telling and selling (specials, deals, new products, etc.).  Providing helpful content that your Fans can actually learn from IS NOT promoting.
• Do your status updates frequently use the phrases “call us” or “limited time offer”?
• Do you follow/connect with others on social networks and immediately send them a message about your service or product?

Over-promotional social media sins happen for one of two reasons:

1. You don’t know what else to post, or
2. You REALLY like talking about yourself, what you sell, and over sharing your “specials”.

We can help you with #1.  If you fall in the second category….it may be time for therapy.  You should probably step away from the social media for a little while.

OK, so you over promote on social media.  But you do so because you do not know what else to post.  Here’s how to fix it.

• Write a blog that provides helpful tips that gives your audience some guidance on how to help themselves.  Post a link to those blogs on your social media.
• Google topics that would likely catch your audience’s attention.  For example, if you audience includes small business owners, websites like Inc.com, Mashable.com, and Entrepreneur.com are a wealth of information, and have really informative articles that small business owners find useful.  Post a link to those articles on your social media networks.  It’s OK that the content was not written by you.  What is important is that it is relevant to your audience.
• Have fun!  Post things like, “Have a great weekend” or “Happy St. Patrick’s Day”!

There are many other ways to avoid the over-promotional sin, but this should get you started.  Stay tuned for more social media interventions.