Do’s and Don’ts of Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing can be a great tool to help increase sales for your business and retain customers — if you do it right. If you go about social media marketing the wrong way, at best you will end up wasting your time, and at worst you will actually hurt your business.

Below are a few important do’s and don’ts for social media marketing.

DO Follow These Social Media Marketing Tips:

• Create professional, complete profile. Be sure to have a profile picture, header image, and a complete profile. Be sure to include contact information and your website address. The goal of social media marketing is to get prospective customers to contact you… so make sure you actually give them an easy way to contact you.
• 

  Know who your customer is so you know how to make money from them.

  Know your customers.
  This seems like a basic tip, but some people still need to be told this. Social media marketing is about engaging your customer base so that you can increase sales. I recommend following the 80/20 rule of social media marketing. 80% of what you post should be about THEM – what THEY NEED. What THEY WANT. For example, if you run a roofing business, 80% of your posts should be providing your customer information. You could write posts about how to keep your roof in good shape, what types of roofing is best for certain styles of houses, etc. The remaining 20% posts are your advertising posts. This 20% is where you actually SELL your services.
• Be active, but not too active. A social media account that does not get regularly updated does not increase sales for your business. Neither does a social media account that over saturates your followers. If you rarely update, people forget about you. If you overwhelm their feed with your posts then people will unfollow you. For most businesses, I recommend 4-8 posts a week, spread out over time.
• Provide excellent customer service. Bad customer service equals a loss of business. People are much more likely to share a bad experience they had with a business rather than a good one. If you provide bad customer service word WILL SPREAD. Respond to messages and comments quickly, but do it in a professional manner. If someone leaves a great review, thank them, and encourage them to share their story with their friends. If someone has a complaint, follow up right away… don’t belittle them or weasel out of responsibility — work to actually FIX THEIR ISSUE.
• See what your competitors are doing well, and do better than them. Is there a competitor in your industry that has a lot of followers on Facebook and a lot of interaction on their pages? See what they are doing right, take their idea and do it even better than them. Does your competitor post a lot of videos that see a lot of engagement from their audience? Then maybe you will do well with videos.

Don’t Make These Social Media Mistakes

• Don’t neglect your profile. Like I said in the Do’s section, if you don’t regularly post updates then people will forget about you. Nobody likes to feel neglected.
• Don’t spam. Nobody likes spam. Just because it is YOUR business doesn’t mean everything is about you. Focus on your customers needs. Do you follow pages that post nothing but ads over and over? No? Then why would they? Keep your posts to 1-2 per day, and like I said above, follow the 80/20 rule. Only 20% of your social media posts should be direct advertisements. But they should still be GOOD advertisements that engage your customers and make them want to spend money with you.
• Don’t ignore comments, even if they are negative. This really goes back to the provide excellent customer service tip that I explained in the Do’s section, but is is so important that I am going to repeat it here. No one likes to feel ignored. If a customer posts a complaint, use it as an opportunity to fix the problem for them… maybe then they will do business with you again. Other customers will be able to see that if they have a problem while working with you that you will do your best to fix it.
• Don’t rely on automation. Sure it is easier, but not everything in life is easy. Don’t rely on software that auto-magically posts updates to all your social media profiles at once. Sure it takes less time, but it looks automated and computer generated. Social media marketing is about networking. Your customers want to network with YOU — a real person, not a computer generated post. Automated posts may also run into formatting errors or other issues.

Need help with social media marketing?

Five Star Creative can help. Get a free quote and consultation on our social media marketing services, so we can help grow your business!