Are You Making These Costly Social Media Marketing Mistakes?

Social media is a ripe land for developing connections, as well as for offending and making enemies. Knowing what you shouldn’t do in relation to social media is almost as important as understanding what you should be doing. Here are several social media mistakes to avoid like the plague!

Jokes in poor taste – It should be obvious, but you really need to put on your thinking cap before you tweet, update or post. And above all, don’t try and benefit from someone else’s misfortune as a way to promote your products or services. While a celebrity death or humiliation may seem like easy pickings for trending traffic, you can actually end up alienating more people than you attract!

Offensive statements and political rants – Closely related is the temptation to broadcast your preferences political, social or otherwise, which may have the misfortune of NOT aligning with those of your clients and customers. Don’t go there! Try to keep from sharing anything that might be misunderstood, or you’ll find yourself scrambling for cover! Once trust is broken, it’s very difficult to rebuild.

Failing to separate your business and personal accounts – Not to mention that it appears much more professional to make a company profile and page, often times there are benefits (depending on the social network) for a purely company account. This is certainly true with Google Local. A public business account is usually easier to be found in the search engine results.

Not using social media buttons on your site – These are very easy to make use of, and available for all social media platforms. You’re basically throwing traffic away if you don’t utilize these simple tools to extend your reach by making them accessible for your homepage and all the content you create. This is very easy to do.

Not using your social media profiles to link back to your site – You’ve gone to all the bother to create and use these social sites, why not take the free, authoritative link they’re offering back to you! Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Google all allow you to link back to your website. There’s five great links into your site, and a great chance for your (hopefully) many followers to end up on your site.