Editor’s note: This article was first published in June 2013; it reflects the 2013 social media landscape, including Google+ (shut down for consumers in 2019), Twitter (now X) and Facebook walls. Its advice on two hashtags on Twitter and three on Google+ reflects 2013 practice.
It doesn’t matter how big your business is: it needs to be online. Over time, as your followers grow across the different social networks, you will have an online shop window, a way of reaching potential buyers and a very cheap form of advertising.
Let’s start from the premise that our company is not as well known as Zara or Victoria’s Secret, so the rules of the game are different for us. Here are some of the mistakes and habits that small businesses tend to fall into when they launch themselves on social media, drawn by the idea that the internet lets us make our product or service known.
1. Asking for tweets, likes or shares
We understand how discouraging it is to put a post on social media and see it go completely unnoticed. Not a single retweet on Twitter, not a single like on Facebook, while we see other posts with 90,000 likes that have been shared thousands of times. The internet is like real life: a guy everybody likes tells a bad joke and everyone laughs, while a stranger tells a brilliant joke and nobody finds it funny. It’s nothing personal, but the last thing you should do is ask people to like or retweet your post. You will have seen plenty of posts that say: “If you think yes, like this; if you think no, share it.” That is forcing it, and on social media, if you force things, you can produce the opposite effect, which is losing followers. It’s like asking people to love you out of charity.
2. Overcompensating for inactivity
Sometimes, after posting or tweeting regularly, we drop the habit for a while for one reason or another. Then we come back with a vengeance and try to make up for the inactivity with a flood of posts and tweets. While it’s true that some followers may unfollow inactive accounts, they are more likely to unfollow you for clogging up their feeds.
3. Ignoring your followers
We look for followers at all costs (or rather, future buyers), but sometimes a user asks something about the product and we don’t answer. We simply ignore them, and that is a mistake that even large companies with an online presence won’t risk making. In fact, many brands are even much quicker at resolving customer complaints online, because they know they have to respond fast so as not to tarnish their reputation. So for a small business it’s even more important.
4. Setting up auto-DMs
I consider this way of greeting new followers not only outdated but actually annoying. If you want to thank new followers for following you, do it personally, but don’t send an automatic thank-you reply. And even less should you set up a welcome DM along these lines: “Thanks for following us, check out our offer at *****.com“. In a medium like the internet, which gives us the chance to communicate with people all over the world in real time, automated messages can come across as spam even to people who don’t know what spam is.
5. A poor landing page
If social media users, once they decide to visit your site, find a free-for-all where anything goes, your social media strategy will be achieving nothing. We have said more than once that one of the biggest advantages I see in e-commerce is that your business can be a shop in an old basement under your house, and yet you can give it a web presence as if you were an international company. As long as the service or product you offer is good, who cares.
6. Rising to the bait
In the real world, as on the internet, there are people who are harder to convince: they tend to be more defensive and more suspicious, and they will bombard us with questions, which we have to answer. Then there are those people, who also exist in real life, whom we might call pests, whose purpose is precisely that, out of boredom or various childhood circumstances. Never rise to the bait with them, because stooping to certain levels or using bad language will not improve your company’s image or your professionalism. If we’re talking about a professional pest, the best thing you can do is block the user, but never waste your time on them. Social media management also includes checking for comments that add nothing except unfounded destructive criticism or an insult towards you or another user. By the same token, never delete a comment from someone who has politely told you about a problem or a fault in your product or service, because that could have very serious consequences for your image on social media.
7. Hashtag overload
Hashtags are an excellent way to reach users who don’t follow us. Hashtags were created to categorise content and reach a more specific audience. However, many people try to cram as many hashtags as possible into a single tweet, to the point of making it unreadable. Other times it’s done solely to reach as many groups as possible, even if they have nothing to do with our subject. That can also be considered spam. Some social media experts advise using a maximum of 2 hashtags on Twitter, while on other social networks such as Google+ we could use 3. Using more in a single post would no longer make sense.
Further reading
- 9 marketing strategies for small businesses on almost no money
- 10 commandments for failing in business for sure
Featured image: Sashimi-b, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
