Three Mistakes Businesses Make When It Comes To Social Media
As a full-stack marketer with a specialty in digital media, the most common questions I get are for tips to gain more followers on social media. Here is the secret: followers come when you approach the content in the right way. Most businesses using social media are making one or more of three key mistakes when it comes to posting content.
In order of difficulty, here are the three things that businesses get wrong when they are attempting to build a social media presence for their brands:
Platform
Perspective
Persistence
I cover each in detail below, along with some tips for approaching these challenges for your business.
(1) Platform: Pick One and Kick Ass On It
For this discussion, I am defining “platform” as the social media entity where you post: Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat, etc. Being everywhere and doing it well is really hard and will take a team of people to accomplish success (or burn one person out really quickly). You can easily be everywhere and do just the minimum — like using the same copy and same image, cropped the same way, on every platform, posted at the same time everywhere. I call this approach the “establishing legitimacy” plan because it is not about building relationships with followers and growing a community. Instead, it is about showing that you are a real business posting on a regular basis and will show up when someone searches for you (hence the “establishing legitimacy” description).
However, if you actually want to sell your products or services to an engaged community, learn from that community, and build trust with the people that follow your business, you have to spend time customizing the content by platform and engaging with the people on that platform. Which takes a lot of time — as in several hours a day per platform.
When you think that you need to be on all platforms, doing all the content posting and engagement, it gets expensive if you’ve hired someone like me or quickly overwhelming for a person to whom you’ve lumped on “social media” as one of their job responsibilities.
Rather than try to be all things to all people, especially if you have limited time and limited resources, the best approach is to pick one platform where you think you can make the most impact with your audience and focus only on that platform. Build an engaged audience with your best content, tailored to that platform, and only expand to other platforms once you have the time and resources, and then you can take some of the audience traction gained and apply it to the next one.
(2) Perspective: What Can Followers Expect From You?
Your followers should know what to expect from you when it comes to social media. We all have varied interests and things we want to share, but when starting out for your business: pick a thing and own it. Be the go to source for whatever your thing is. And it may take you a bit to figure out and hone your voice, your perspective, your hook.
To help you stick with this, I suggest writing an “elevator pitch” that sums up exactly what you offer and why people should follow you. Put this someplace you can refer to regularly. And even put it in your social bio or video intros to let people know what they are getting by engaging with you and your content.
Once you’ve built an audience and have established what people can expect from your content, you can start expanding out to other areas that make sense with your defined perspective.
(3) Persistent Consistency: Easy To Start, Hard To Maintain
Even if you figure out the other two things on this list, if you are not consistent, you might as well not post. Whether you do one long video on YouTube a month or you are doing three short videos a week on TikTok, or one photo on Instagram a week, or one every day, pick a schedule for the content and platform you’ve selected and stick with it. Audiences are fickle these days and algorithms are even more capricious. If you are inconsistent, your audience will stop looking for you on a regular basis and the algorithm won’t deliver your content at the top of feeds. All the hard work of building consistency goes out the door when you take a break.
Pick a schedule that you can stick with. It is easy to be excited when you start and think that you will post daily, but you may figure out that is not sustainable. Start with what you know you can do, then increase the frequency if it makes sense for your schedule.
Once you have mastered these three things on social media, only then should you start thinking about looking at growing your audience outside your networks to other platforms, through partnerships and collaborations, and paid advertising.
