Social media looks like a panacea of free marketing and promotion that, following a bit of tweeting will lead to massive increase in your online sales.
But be warned, it has a touch of the Lyre of Orpheus about it: it can make beautiful music, but you may end up living in hell.
Read On:
Beginners guide to social media
Five reasons social media is perfect for SMEs
Nine social media sins
So what are the main pitfalls with social media marketing that you should be aware of?
Don’t assume it’s easy
Let’s be honest, most businesses join the social networks for one reason, they want to increase sales. To do that they figure, quite rightly, they need to let more people know they exist and they need to tell more people what they sell.
And that’s where the problems begin, because they fail to realise that social networks are not sales platforms. They are just a single part of a holistic system that works in conjunction with, and not separate from, the rest of their business and its marketing activities.
What makes you different?
There are many reasons why people buy from the online stores they buy from: price, convenience, loyalty to name but a few. There are also many people who buy from particular places simply because they do. Assuming that you can come along and start to peel customers off one site and stick them on yours and watch your sales boom is at best niaive.
Instead, you have to work out what makes you different from competitors. What can you do or offer that will encourage shoppers to come to you? Social media plays a part in this, but assuming that you can start pumping out pithy bin mots on twitter every day and consumers will swap from their traditional loyalties to you won’t be happening.
Telling them the wrong things
Many websites and the social media outreach associated with them tend to concentrate too much on the business itself and not on helping the consumer.
One way to get people to buy tins of beans from you, the start up bean-monger, as opposed to traditional vendor of baked beans, is not to have a site and a stream of tweets about how marvellous you are as a business, but to offer handy information such as “three novel things to do with beans”.
This not only clearly offers the shopper information, but it might peak their interest to look not at buying your beans, but for what to do with beans. You then have to get them to buy your beans – but once they are on your site that is a whole lot easier.
It takes time
Social media is an essential part of your business plan and marketing strategy, but it takes time: both your time every day to work on it and keep on top of it, but also to bed in and start to yield results.
Many people give up on it too soon as it hasn’t magically delivered 100% increase in sales (or 110% if you are a fan of X-factor, rather than a stickler for maths). You have to stick at it and keep going once you start.
There is nothing more off-putting when people who have engaged with you and followed you find that the daily tweets and Facebook posts and offers have dried up.
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