I’ve said before in a previous blog post that social media can be the worst place to make a mistake. It’s also true that it’s a place where businesses walk past opportunities without realizing it. Social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are full of features, services, and guides to help businesses succeed that people don’t use. We’re here to help as many businesses as we can avoid these marketing mistakes.
Whenever we try to boost the visibility of any new clients on social media, we take a look at what they’re doing and what their competitors are doing. This side-by-side comparison helps clients see what they’re doing right and what they’re doing wrong. As we do this, there are some issues that we see that no one should be making on social media. With these tips, you can avoid some easy mistakes that you can also easily fix.
Marketing Mistake #1: No Links to Your Site
When marketing on social media, it’s important to do more than only post about your business. Social media sites are about being social, and marketing messages aren’t social. At the same time, if you’re posting an image of workers having fun on break, at a work function, or testing a new product or recipe, you can add a link back to your business.
On Twitter and Facebook, adding a link doesn’t have to replace an image. You can easily replace whatever automated image they put in for the link with your own. Then it looks, sounds, and feels like a social media post, just with a link back to your site. On Instagram, adding a link to the image description won’t change anything, so your core content isn’t affected.
When you show your target audience how human your business is, you show how much they can trust you. However, the trust you earn doesn’t mean anything if you’re not giving your target audience every appropriate avenue to interact with you. If you’re a restaurant that just posted a picture of a new menu item or a pool provider who has a new pool product, you should have a link for whoever sees it to check it out.
Why Does it Happen?
We commonly see businesses make this mistake to avoid seeming too aggressive and turning off their target audience. That’s a good mentality to have in moderation. You don’t want to only sell yourself social media. Doing that will push your audience away from your business. At the same time, not adding any links to your message is an extreme step to do that.
As long as your posts sound like they’re coming from a human in an appropriately professional manner, a link to your site is fine. You miss out on a lot of site traffic by not having them.
If capturing new clients wasn’t enough, posting links on your social media accounts will serve as good backlinks for each of your site’s pages. You get more traffic from the post, and then more traffic from the boost in SEO.
Marketing Mistake #2: No Call-to-Action
This is a similar mistake to the previous one where clients and their competitors have desperately avoided links, so they avoid calls-to-action. A call-to-action (CTA) is a phrase or word that bookends marketing content. If you’ve ever heard a phrase like “call now,” “learn more,” and “try one, get one free today,” you’ve read a CTA.
CTAs are not bad unless they’re done poorly, like many aspects of marketing. If you post a quick tidbit about a feature of your product or service, then head into a CTA, you’re not necessarily going to find success. What we’ve noticed is that clients and their competitors have really good visual content and appealing written content, and then no CTA.
When you have good visuals and/or well-written content, a CTA will feel natural. Admittedly, not every post will work with a CTA, so it’s worth experimenting if you’re not sure. Abandoning this common tool is dangerous because a few simple words to encourage someone to buy or make a reservation is a powerful strategy. It would be a waste to never utilize one.
Why Does This Happen?
When done poorly, CTAs stand out and send people running, especially on social media. While they’re far from impossible to do right, they are easier to get wrong than many other marketing tactics. That makes them intimidating try out.
When this is the case, taking the advice of an experienced marketing firm can help you figure out what should work and what won’t.
Marketing Mistake #3: No Videos
We’ve also talked before about how videos prompt greater engagement with your audiences than text and pictures. They have all the strengths of a graphic and the added bonus of being able to hold someone’s attention for more than a moment. Videos are informative, entertaining, and get people thinking about your brand.
Twitter, Facebook, and especially Instagram empower users to post videos on their platform, yet we see a lot of clients who never post short videos. If the ability to record, edit, and upload videos to older social media sites doesn’t convince you, consider that the biggest social media platform right now is TikTok, which is all about making and posting short videos on the fly.
Why Does This Happen?
Videos can appear difficult to make to someone who hasn’t done it before. Years of seeing expensive highly-edited commercials on television and online hardwired many people to think that’s all video was. Something expensive and difficult to make.
Nowadays, people are equally, if not more excited, to see a 15-second video of someone holding a phone’s camera to their face, talking about this excellent dish they made, before showing it to them. Social media sites have worked hard to make this process easy and simple enough that law firms and small businesses alike can make and put something out in minutes. It’s far easier than it looks.
Bonus Tip: Contact an Experienced Social Media Marketing Firm
ENX2 Marketing has been working with our clients to improve and upkeep their social media output for years. We’re always looking to keep up with trends and appropriately approach fads to raise brand awareness for our clients. If you’re still nervous to try adding links, calls-to-action, and videos to your social media strategies, or just don’t have the time or patience, contact a firm that can do it for you. ENX2 Marketing is that firm, and we’re ready to help. Contact us today.