Professional Social Promotion

This is a list of the top ten mistakes I see my clients making with their social media pages and campaigns.

I see these mistakes a lot, and it’s good to write these things down so I can just give someone a link to read.

Here they are in no particular order, the top ten things that I believe are the biggest mistakes that you can make in social media marketing.

Top Ten Social Media Marketing Mistakes

• Not thinking about keywords. You seriously have to think about SEO with every single thing you do in social media or on an article, blog post, or anything. You need to give your Facebook page a title that has exact match search volume on the Google keyword tool, your You Tube videos, Google Plus page, Linked In company page.. How is anyone going to find you if they don’t find you in a search? Ads are expensive. Some people use their company name, that’s great if you’re Coca-cola, but not if nobody’s searching for you by your name.

• Giving all your pages the same keyword titles. Seriously, you’d think I was making this up if you know a fair bit about SEO, but some people continue to give every single page they make the same title, or they have a website where all the pages have the same title at the top. The goal is to rank for as many different searches as possible, on Google, and on the social media sites.

• Not updating your status enough. If you go to the trouble of getting twenty thousand likes on your Facebook page from real, targeted people, or you get tens of thousands of random Twitter followers and then you just let them sit there, that’s not going to do anything. Sometimes your Facebook page or Twitter profile can pick up click-through traffic to your website from being found in a search, or through and ad campaign as I mentioned before, but the idea is that people click on your tweets and posts on an ongoing basis. Every hour if possible

• Create quality content. Often a company will hire an SEO company or writers to make pages to boost up the rankings of their site. Some would say that this is necessary to get decent rankings, and that it helps your rankings to publish these spam pages on your Facebook page. Forget that, that makes you look like your business is rubbish. Fire the SEO company that produces rubbish, the way Google is heading spam pages that have a high bounce rate and that are manually reviewed by Google staff will be de-indexed, or punished as time goes on. The goal of Google leading into the future is to rid the internet of spam, and punish those who make bad content for the sole purpose of making cheap back links

• Seek out friends who share your interests. When I first started out on Facebook, I started looking for people to send friend requests to that shared my interest in article writing. I found a few, and then I just blindly followed the friend requests that came up on my dashboard. I ended up in a group of friends who write romance novels. That obviously isn’t at all what I’m interested in, and there’s not much I can do with a bunch of friends like that. Twitter is different, you can have as many followers as you want, but you want to be selective with your friends on Facebook. Joining groups is also a great way to meet people who share your interests, on Linked In, Google Plus, and Yahoo Groups as well.

• Trying to do too much at once. I’m guilty of this myself. I find that I try to maintain a presence on every single social media site, while also trying to write blog posts on four different sites of my own, make You Tube videos, chat to people in forums, write guest posts, write articles for clients, fill orders, etc, etc. Don’t spread yourself too thin, and seek help if you need it

• Be very careful about the help you get. The internet is basically made up of everyone in the world who has a computer. People will make amazing claims that they can do this or that for you, but the truth is often that it’s nothing more than a lie, and you’re lucky if you get half of what is being promised. Often you can get your money back, but it turns into a big argument at times, so try to talk to a person for a while first to get a sense of who they are, where they come from, and ask to see samples of their work or start small before you jump into a big deal.

• Make a strong call to action. It’s not enough to post Twitter pics of cats with funny expressions on their faces. I see people completely wasting their time by talking about their lives or the weather, or quotes from famous people through history. This is how you use Twitter if you’re an average joe, but not how you use it for business. There may need to be some sort of cross over between a pure business tweet and a personal style tweet, but the idea is to get them to click on the link and visit your site. Anything that doesn’t make this happen is a waste of time in business terms. It may be worth offering value so that people keep an eye out for your tweets, but you should be offering value on the pages you tweet anyway.

• Don’t try to be fun if you’re not fun. If you’re an insurance company, selling life insurance, or health insurance, there’s nothing fun about that. There’s almost no reason why anybody would want to look at anything you have to say at all on Facebook. Why would somebody follow the Twitter account of a life insurance company? The only way they would is if there was incentive for them to, like on a social swapping site, where they earned points to do it. My thoughts are, pay for a funny professional TV ad to be made and then hope the You Tube video goes viral.

• Don’t give up. There may be a point when you think that it’s all too much, and that the amount of time you have to put into social media marketing is not worth the return. This may be true in some cases, but don’t forget that social media sites are continually growing in members every day, people are using them more and more as search engines, opening up endless possibilities for new keyword phrase searches, and it takes time and effort for you to be a part of this worldwide phenomenon. You can’t expect to get results without putting in hard work on a consistent basis. Try to think of things from the perspective of the potential customer. What do they want to see?

 Conclusion

To avoid making these mistakes and many others, it’s best to hire someone with a lot of experience in internet marketing, (like me), who can help you do things in the right way.

Get in contact with me via the contact form in the sidebar, or by sending me a message at [email protected] and tell me about your site, and include links so I can take a look at it, and work out a plan that might work for you.