If you want to avoid looking like a rookie in the world of online marketing then it is important for you to learn how to properly utilize social media to your advantage. While this may seem like an easy task, there is some skill involved as well as a basic understanding of loyalty marketing insights. If utilized correctly, social media can help to attract a loyal following and propel your company to success. If used incorrectly, social media can attract fair-weather followers who only visit your page long enough to click the “like” button, then never return. If you want to experience as much success as possible through online social media marketing, be sure to avoid these common social media mistakes that small businesses make.

1.     Lack of Strategy

Before you even begin to create a social media profile page, you need to figure out your overall strategy. Each post that you make to your profile page should fit into that long-term strategy and propel you towards your goal. Small businesses typically have strategies that fall into one of the 3 following categories:

1. Growth / Exposure
2. Service
3. Engagement

If you are focused entirely on growth and exposure, then your posts will be dedicated to the main goal of drawing attention to your brand and attracting a wide audience of potential customers.

If you are focused entirely on service, then you have already developed a solid customer base and you want to make sure that you react to your customers’ needs, suggestions and complaints.

If you are focused entirely on engagement, then you will use social media to interact with your customers and retain their interest through the use of surveys, contests, recognition, etc.

If you want to be truly successful while utilizing social media, then you should use a combination of all 3 strategies, but choose one all-important strategy that will help to direct your online posts and will give you a clear goal to focus on. Having a clear strategy will also help you to come up with marketing campaigns that naturally build off of each other.

2.     Lack of Consistency

When you first start out with social media marketing you will probably experience a lot of trial and error. However, once you find a marketing strategy that works, try to repeat it and be consistent with your messaging. Pay close attention to which marketing tactics consistently draw in the most traffic and the most followers, and then repeat those marketing tactics in the future. If you learn how to consistently get great results then you will be able to put less effort into developing dozens of sporadic marketing strategies that may or may not work.

3.     Lack of Engagement

If you don’t engage your followers then your social media profile page is destined to fail. Your customers want to feel like they have a niche in your business and if you don’t engage them then they will inevitably look elsewhere. Try using some of these tactics to engage your followers:

•  Use blog comments to interact with your customers and get their attention.
• Utilize surveys so that your followers can give you their feedback and suggestions.
• Recognize followers who are loyal to your company and who drive more business to your profile page.
• 

If you want to maximize your chances of social media success, make sure you avoid some of the common social media mistakes that small businesses make and follow the helpful suggestions above.