By Jocelyn Ian
Small businesses need to make their presence felt online for substantial and consistent business growth. Most businesses, irrespective of their size, are online these days, and it helps them reach out to a broader audience and boosts marketing efforts tremendously.
There are many social media networks these days where making your presence felt helps you in growing your community, be noticed in the targeted market, and appeal to your target audience. If you are not too sure of how to go about approaching your social media strategy, taking the help of a personal branding consultant may help.
There are a few things that small businesses might be unaware of when devising their strategies. This indicates that you need to reach out to a personal branding consultant. Here, we would discuss a few of the things you should not do when promoting your business on social media.
Disorganized Planning
Using social media to promote your business needs to be in an articulated fashion to ensure that it looks organized and professional. Do not promote or market your brand, company, products, and services on social media without a plan as it seems random, poorly planned, and unprofessional. Every post you make on social media represents your business, and it should be for a particular goal.
Set goals and develop a social media strategy that is inter-connected among different social media networks and works collectively to present your brand in a positive light among the target audience. Without a plan, your social media promotion may do just the opposite.
Do Not Mislead or Lie
Small businesses may get overwhelmed by the massive presence on social media of the large companies and competitors of the same industry. However, do not get inclined towards lying or misleading to your audience and followers to gain more likes, followers, and subscribers. It is neither a good nor a sustainable strategy in the long-term.
Be Humble and Active
Even if it is your company and brand that you are promoting, there is always a space for personalization. Be humble in your approach on social media, and do not shy away from saying thanks to your audience personally for retweeting a post or engaging in the comment section of the Facebook post.
Be active and responsive, and if you find there is something you can contribute to any post or discussion happening on your page, it is always a good idea to jump in. Adding a bit of your personality to your social media promotion can help drastically.
Do Not Spam
Email spamming is not the only kind of spamming these days, and it has entered the world of social media as well. Stay away from spamming when trying to promote your brand, products, and services on social media networks. Do not keep on posting the same post with the same redundant content or send private messages repeatedly until the receiver has to block you. It not only creates a bad impression online of your brand but negatively impacts your marketing campaign as well.
Do Not Only Engage in Self-Promotion
While the entire idea of social media planning and marketing is to promote you and your brand, it never hurts by talking about other companies, brands, and reputed personalities in your industry or related sector. Helping friends who are just starting or associates who can do with a little push on social media would make you sound generous to your target audience. It would also balance your promotion online that may start to sound irritating if it is too much focused on self-promotion.
Social media has the potential to turnaround your business if you devise the right strategy and stick to it. Do not get swayed away by the competition and continue to update your marketing strategy from time to time as per the market trends. Irrespective of how you go about social media strategy to promote your brand/company, make sure to stay away from committing the mistakes mentioned above.
