***Four Social Media Strategy Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

It really is no surprise that over the past two years social media marketing has received a ton of attention. Most often, you’ll see a lot of success stories by inte et celebrities, major brands and niche businesses and how they used it to their benefit. However, for others, the success stories just aren’t happening. Overall, some have had to deal with a plethora of commercial failure through social media. The press has a tendency to look at social media through rose-colored glasses and commend its beneficial behavior. Don’t get me wrong, we love social media, but the fact is there have been poor product promotions and failures in PR online marketing. Most of the time, these failures are due to slight errors and a miscalculated strategy. Below, we are discussing the four major errors in strategy that are the most commonly made. Take this in, memorize the solution and implement them into your own social media marketing strategy to prevent social media fails. 1. Getting Bad Press? Not a Problem: The worst thing you can do if you receive bad press, is to just ignore it. If President Obama didn’t explain or rebut his opinions, sides and facts when he was receiving bad press during the 2008 Presidential Election, it would have hurt him tremendously. If you receive bad press you need to respond and provide explanations. Don’t let the untrue grow. The word-of-mouth strategy does work, so make sure you get your side of the story out there. Basically, follow this formula: analyze, collect your thoughts, acknowledge it and then turn it around and use it to your advantage. 2. Attention and Activity: One of the worst social media fails is failing to give enough. A social media presence requires a lot of attention…constantly, (Which is one great reason to hire a social media virtual assistant if you’re having trouble keeping up!) Repeatedly, businesses and their social media marketing plans fail because they didn’t put enough time or effort into it. Social media strategies can be referred to as a branding exercise, so it’s easy to consider that if you leave it inactive, the brand can lose potential and ultimately become negative. Naturally, the best way to avoid this is to remain active. However, if your social media presence does become inactive then you should remove it, begin planning for a re-release, and then do it when you can devote the necessary time and have a suitable strategic plan. 3. Less is More: It’s very easy to get carried away with social media sites. Sometimes we can get so carried away that the information we are giving just happens to be a little too much. For instance, Twitter is a great site for conducting promotions, but when used for personal things, it can also reflect on your business. It’s better to approach this by revealing less and doing more. When “tweeting,” focus on things that will really help your business, or things that relate to your business instead of just tweeting anything and everything, which is really easy to do on Twitter. You don’t want to be labeled as a spammer either, which can happen and inadvertently, it can hurt your business. To be sustainable, tweet less and do more. 4. Don’t Get Tunnel Vision: We all know how awesome social media can be, and it’s free. Plus, it is everything you’d want from a promotional tool. However, you don’t want to get so far gone with it that you neglect your other marketing and promotional endeavors. Social media isn’t the only way to market your business, nor is it the ultimate form of marketing. You should sit down and think about all your marketing strategies and cross-pollinate. Don’t stay focused on just one area, make use of them all. Now that we’ve discussed the four most commonly made mistakes of social media marketing, how do these apply to your business? What can you do to make it better? Surely you will find that using these methods will alleviate some, if not all, of your social media fails. Good luck and get busy strategizing and making those social media plans.