These four mistakes almost every business is making in social media may surprise you!
- Too much self-promotion. When people don’t know what content to post on their business pages, they turn to what they know the most about: their products and services. BUT, too much self-promotion can come off as sounding like a megaphone. If you want to talk about yourself with complete wreckless abandon, there are ads for that. People get hit with ads all the time, but on social media, they’re looking for fun content to engage with. And since you don’t want your content to be mistaken for ads, how do you find that sweet spot – getting engagement while promoting? Good question! It’s the biggest struggle for every social media content producer, business owner or manager. But it IS POSSIBLE to showcase your products without saying, “Buy my product!” and you can showcase your skills without saying, “HIRE ME!” The number one way to do this is to produce content that visually answers the question for your customer: “What’s in it for me?” Which brings us to….
- Not producing enough content surrounding the BENEFITS of your ideal/client customer. Make the following lists:
- Benefits of my products or services for my clients/customers (You’ll never need another piece of jewelry again, your social media is done, a place for your family to gather.) These benefits have to invoke feelings of things like relief, love, FOMO, happiness and sheer joy, laughter & “wishing” (nothing negative – stay away from anger). Emotions are what cause people to respond to posts, which is why Facebook put all the different emotions on posts. If you look at something you’re about to post and it does none of this, don’t post it.
- What you love, why you love your business, all the success stories, your *why* – because you CAN showcase your love for your own business and products, and you should. What fueled you to do this? What’s your backstory? How does doing this help you? Help you help others? Help your family? Telling these stories helps your clients and customers to be able to identify with the real you and ultimately engage with your content and your page. You can be a nameless/faceless product if you want to try that, but even we know the guy behind “MyPillow” or Dave, the creator of Wendy’s or Sara Blakely, the creator of Spanx…
- Any other parallel services/businesses/topics: If you’re in real estate, you can post about interior decorating, Pinterest-worthy holiday decorating, quick DIY upgrades to your house that up the value, think about your industry and what other interests your clients and customers have surrounding it. One of my clients is a cafe and they’re avid runners, they created a run group. Business owners have passions too! Think about visual, creative topics you can take pictures or videos of.
- NOTE: Post wording is important. Remember, DON’T: MEGAPHONE: “GET THIS CHOCOLATE CAKE!” DO: SHOW BENEFITS: “It’s been a stressful day. Here’s some drippy drizzly chocolate cake to think about. We’re here when you’re ready.”
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3. Not looking at the posts that performed well and REPLICATING THEM (scrapping the duds). I KNOW you love that post and you worked so hard on it and you’re convinced it’s the best post ever, but numbers don’t lie. If it didn’t resonate with people, just don’t do it again. Look at how many reactions it got, comments, shares, etc. (note: this may be hard in the building phase of your page because you have to start somewhere, so my advice here is to DUPLICATE SUCCESSES ALL THE TIME.) Facebook loves it when you have an engaging post and when you do more of that, Facebook will show your future posts to more people. But what happens if you have a bunch of duds in there? Facebook decides, “This person’s not engaging, I’m not going to show it to people.” So it can ruin future engagement. Get into the algorithm and stay there by producing consistent engaging content.
4. Not doing enough beautiful videos: Videos are just so big right now on every platform, everyone should be doing more of them. Not talking heads (although that’s actually better than no video at all), but pretty videos that make people stop and watch. You have 0-3 seconds to grab someone’s attention, make sure that first 0-3 seconds is the best part of your video. You can always start with the best shot and work backwards. If you want any examples of this, head over to the Tasty Facebook page, they do it every.single.time. You don’t need extravagant editing equipment and cameras, just a phone will do and you can edit on free apps like iMovie or “No Crop,” or get a subscription to Adobe for Spark or Premiere (a little more advanced, but I taught myself on YouTube so it can’t be THAT advanced.)
Stay tuned for the next four mistakes to avoid as a business owner doing social! In the meantime, grab these free resources and tools for you to create amazing content with!