Social media is an important and growing source for campaigners to sell their product or service, to their audience or customers. However, with its far reaching influence comes the risk of making blunders because they either don’t understand how it works or how to work with it.
As this media forum grows, more and more people are working towards advertising themselves into it. However, lot end up making mistakes. Here is a list of 10 mistakes that people may commit that would end up either making the campaign ineffective or worse still backfires.
1. Not knowing your audience: Before taking a plunge into social media, you must ensure that you know your audience. It is important that your communication is consumed by your customer. Ensure that you are talking to the right audience through the social media.
2. Not knowing what to do with social media: Social media is not a rat race. Just because everyone is investing in social media you don’t have to. Understand what social media is and how it will impact you. Understand it before you start working with it.
3. Too much exposure: There is something as too much exposure. While you are working with social media you must be sure that you are not ‘in your customer’s face’. Space it out, ensure that you are intruding and do not be loud about anything.
4. Always talking shop: People like to learn and understand different things at different times. Try and talk about other things in your social media effort. Analyze the kind of topics that might interest your audience and ensure to cover as many topics as you can.
5. Faking it: People can smell a lie. So don’t fake it. Whether it is being too friendly or communicating without credibility, this surely can be a spoiler for your audience. Before you know it, all credibility will be lost and people will just stop listening.
6. Not paying attention to competition: It is one thing to focus your energies on your product or service; however, to not pay heed to what your competitors are doing is just silly. While you use the media to communicate, ensure that you also understand what the competitors are saying about themselves or you.
7. Using the same strategy on every site: Repetition will be ignored. Though the message that you communicate using social media must be unified, the way you represent the same message using the different social media options must be different.
8. Focusing on quantity over quality: More often than not, with social media and its reach, you may thing that you need to keep reminding people of your product of service. But remember that quantity is more important. When you put a message out, ensure that it is more impactful that it is aired multiple times.
9. Social media is for everybody: If you think that anyone can run a social media campaign, then certainly you are naive when it comes to social media and its ways. There are professionals that know how to conduct a social media campaign, so ask for help. However, remember that even through the campaign is run by a professional it is still your product or service, so take ownership.
10. Ignoring other media: Remember that other media is still relevant in today’s day and age. While you do invest in social media, because that is the ‘in’ thing, do not ignore other traditional media.
