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Five Reasons Your Social Media Efforts are Going Nowhere
December 2, 2013 |Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
One of the reasons that great sports teams are great is that they work on and practice the fundamentals over and over. Today’s column is a variation on this theme. Here are five social media mistakes that companies make over and over again.
Your Content is All About You
You talk about how great you are, how you are the expert at some aspect of your industry instead of sharing that expertise and helping your readers or followers. Social media allows companies to demonstrate that expertise. Make it all about the customer; make it all about his or her problems. A major long-haul trucking manufacturer started a Twitter campaign a couple of years ago that consisted entirely of tips for truckers on getting better mileage, performance, and lower maintenance costs. The result was more sales as the truckers saw the manufacturer as one who understood their problems and was interested in helping them. Make your content about your customers.
You’re a Spammer
You actively sell in places like LinkedIn Groups and Google+ circles. Your idea of participation is posting something self serving. You know those annoying Viagra e-mails clogging up your inbox? That’s who you are. And you’re just as welcome. You are a spammer.
A variation on this is the “post and run” where a group member posts something (usually self serving like press release) and runs. Groups are for discussions and such posts invite no discussion. Post-and-run is counterproductive as group members automatically label this person as clueless.
You’re SporadicMany companies are unpredictable with their newsletters, social media posts, and other communications. They don’t follow a schedule.
I have seen companies post five or seven times to their Facebook company page in a single week. Then they don’t post at all for another month. Then a flurry of posts show up again. If it is apparent that you can’t organize your time, what kind of signal does that send to prospective customers?People like schedules and they like consistency. When I first started my blog, I wrote when I had time and had a lot of posts, but my timing was all over the place--Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday one week; Wednesday, Thursday the next; and Monday, Wednesday, Friday the week after. I found that when I started posting on a regular day at a regular time my readership went up. I found less posts plus schedule equals more readers.
You Don’t Track and You Don’t Measure
A simple question: If you don’t measure what you're doing, how will you know if you're getting better at it? How do you know if what you do is working?
Those who don’t measure also don’t tend to experiment. Say you have 200 followers. Well, why don’t you have 400? How can you get 400? What could you do? What could you try? Once you find what is working, how can you do more of it? One one of my social networks, I have five different types of posts. One type consistently gets more readers than all the others. So I ramped that type up and it brings in sales leads. Apparently, I was doing the right thing, I just needed to do more of it. If I hadn’t been measuring, I wouldn’t have figured that out.
Your Content Isn’t GreatThe true power in social media is sharing--the social part. In many cases, you know, or know who, your followers and readers are. But if they share your content with their network it goes to people you don’t know, and places you would like to be.
Mediocre content may get read, but great content gets shared. Your content should be good enough that people go “I have to send this to...” and they start thinking of all the people that would like to see it. This is why making great content is worth the effort.
These are just five areas with which companies struggle. There are many more, but these are the building blocks. And it doesn’t matter how pretty your LinkedIn company page is, or your Facebook page, if your fundamentals are poor.Bruce Johnston is a sales consultant specializing in social media and especially LinkedIn. He has over 25 years experience in high-tech sales and management. He can be reached at brucej@practicalsmm.com or through his profile on LinkedIn.