Social media is a powerful thing; get it right and you can sit back and watch as the followers mount up and, more importantly, the possible sales leads. Whilst you may think that getting your business on Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms is easy, a successful campaign isn’t as simple to achieve as you may first think. The following article discusses the seven deadly sins of social media to ensure you are on the right track to success.

image via (Flickr)

Lack of Scheduling

The great thing about social media is that you can say anything at any moment, but having a schedule and sticking to it is a wise idea. If you don’t have a schedule of say a minimum of a tweet per day, you could find that days go by and your company profile appears to be lying dormant. Start the day with a tweet and you can crack on with the rest of your busy day without it hanging over your head.

Too Corporate

Social media is called social for a reason; it’s about showcasing the personality of your business and therefore sticking to purely corporate content will fail to hit the spot when it comes to your followers. There are many ways you can combat this, such as researching humorous yet industry related articles you can talk about and post links to, as well as making sure your profile picture is of yourself rather than just your company logo.

Too Active

Whilst lying dormant is a sin, so is a constant stream of information, therefore a balance needs to be found. With Facebook, it’s important to remember than when a person likes your page, your updates will enter their news feed and this can be irritating if you are updating all the time. Try to keep updates on Facebook to around every other day and the same goes for Google+. With Twitter, you can afford to be a lot more active so a minimum of one tweet every day is advisable.

No Interaction

No matter how great your tweets and updates are, if you are not interacting with those that have taken the time to follow you and reach out with a question or comment then they will quickly become disgruntled. Social media is all about engagement so it’s vital you actually take the time to engage in conversation! If you don’t feel you can commit to this, a social media marketing strategy is probably not for you.

Giving Personal Opinion

Getting involved in a light-hearted debate is absolutely fine, however when it comes to the more serious issues that divide people it’s probably best to leave your opinions for your personal platforms. Remember that you are the voice of the entire company and are not just speaking as yourself; the main aim is to remain pleasant, interesting and inoffensive at all times.

Using a Company for Social Media

There are many companies that offer packages as part of an online marketing campaign which may seem attractive, especially if you feel pushed for time. Asking someone to engage with your followers about an industry they are not a part of however, can be problematic no matter how skilled there are, so it’s always a much more legitimate and rewarding task when carried out by someone within your own company. Take advice from the professionals by all means, but ultimately the best results are the most natural ones.

Overloading Yourself

With Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and Pinterest to name just a few of most popular platforms it is all too easy to think you need to be on all of them straight away. Slow down, master one or two first and see how you get on! Many industries don’t lend themselves to certain platforms; for instance if your blogs are not image based, you may not get a great deal from Pinterest. There are social media management platforms that can help you streamline your social media efforts such as Hootsuite, so pick a couple you think your industry lends itself to best, add them to Hootsuite and go from there.

The seven sins are easily avoided when you know where to begin, how much time you have available and the tools out there that can help you to get the most out of your social media efforts.

Sophie works for Inbound Marketing and has recently delivered a social media training session to help business owners get to grips with the various platforms out there.