When does Social Media strategy fails?

The impact of social media on the behavior of your customers is increasing every day and nobody can deny it. According to stats, more than 90% of online consumers go to social media websites before buying a product and more than 50% of them take decisions on the basis of information they get from these social media websites, hence no business owner irrespective of the size, type or location of their business can afford to ignore the social media websites in their marketing strategy especially when nine out of your ten customers go to these websites before coming to you.

Although many businesses have already joined and created accounts on popular social networking websites, but still most of them are not able to leverage any kind of benefit from these sites, here we’ll discuss few of the reasons about why your social media strategy failed and what you should do to avoid such mistakes.

Social Networking sites

Using social media for broadcasting – Time and again, we see that most of the companies use their social networking accounts only for making new announcements related to their products and never participate in any kind of conversations. Social networking websites are created for doing conversations and your overall social media strategy fails at the moment when you stop participating in conversations with your target audience and start using your accounts as a medium to broadcast news related to your company.

Lacks of consistency – Many businesses join social networking websites with great expectations, but they stop updating your accounts when they can’t see quick results in form of new clients and increase revenues. Developing relationships on social media websites is a slow process. So have patience and don’t leave your social networking accounts unattended for months because nothing hurts your credibility more than when a user found your account which was not updated from a long time.

Having Nothing Valuable to Say – Your target audience expects you to be an expert in your niche when you are trying to sell something to them. Mostly, business owners don’t update their accounts for days because they can’t find anything that can be shared with their target audience. It gives bad signals to your target audience. So, if you want to establish yourself as an expert amongst them, make sure that you have something valuable to share with them.

When you stop behaving like a person – It is easier to develop a relationship with a human being as compared to building relationship with a company. Your potential customers will always prefer to buy from a friend instead of buying anything from a logo or a company. Make your social networking accounts as human as possible. Don’t limit yourself to product announcements or to conversations related to your products. Take a leap and start participating in conversations which are of interest to your potential buyer. It could be anything from sports to politics, movies to food. And Yes, Don’t forget to enjoy.

So there are the four mistakes which according to us can kill your overall social media campaigns, but we now want to know what more mistakes you think one should avoid on social networking sites. Please share your opinions in the comments below.

[This is a guest post by Roger Rae, who is a freelance writer working for Fortepromo promotional products, a promotional tote bags company based in Minnesota. If you too would like to write for our blogs and get paid per post, please refer to this page.]