Social media marketing best practices have changed so much that it can be hard to tell right from wrong. Back in the day, no one really batted an eye when small businesses bought a bot to light a fire emoji under people’s posts or followed/unfollowed to grow their following. But those moves just don’t work anymore, people. They just don’t. As a Digital Content Strategist with Social Media Marketing as part of my arsenal, here’s all the tips that don’t work in 2021 and what small businesses should do instead.
Myth #1: You need to be on every social media channel!
When it comes to social media marketing tips, this piece of advice is always offered with such enthusiasm. And that’s how small businesses are lead astray thinking that the only way to maximise their social reach is by being everywhere. Not only is this a costly strain on a small business’ time and effort to create unique content for each platform but there’s no guarantees that it will deliver the sales results that they want.
Take a step back and ask whether your offering is useful to every single person on earth. The answer is most likely no. If you consider where you Ideal Customer is, they’re not going to be on every single social media platform either. Even if they were, they spend more time on certain platforms over others. So why would you exhaust yourself being everywhere when your paying customers just aren’t there?
What to do instead: You don’t need everyone’s attention. Just the attention of your Ideal Customers. Here are 3 things you should spend your time doing:
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- Hone in on who your Ideal Customers/Clients are
- Research and select a mix of social media platforms they’re most likely to be active on
- Create content and value that resonates with their unique challenges
- Nurture a relationship that’s built of authenticity and trust (ask your audience what their key problems are and solve them with your product/service, share business BTS and interact with them like a damn human!) and the conversion will come
Myth #2: Visual aesthetics is all that matters
Social media has become a visual-first platform where many users will like, share and save #aesthetic content. There is no shortage of ad buyers singing the importance of finding a visual that captures attention in the first millisecond that its seen. Many will spend the majority of their time searching for that perfect shot that best encapsulates the product that they’re amplifying.
Sadly, not nearly enough people talk about what comes after that.
The social copy.
The reality is that visuals pique interest. But it’s the copy or caption that converts. After all, that’s where you give your audience a clear CTA to progress further along the customer journey with you.
What to do instead: Effective social media marketing requires good visuals and copy. Here’s some quick pointers to perfecting your social copy:
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- Do your captions speak to the challenges that your Ideal Customers are facing?
- Is the copy appropriate for the customer journey phase your audience is in?
- Does the copy state precisely what you want your Ideal Customers to do next with a clear CTA?
- Is there an emotional pull to act with urgency?
Also read: How to Negotiate Salary at a Startup Like a Pro
Myth #3: Follower counts don’t mean anything
This one’s tricky. It’s true that we’ve evolved to talk in terms of engagement levels, rather than follower counts in 2021. After all, not everyone who follows your business will buy from you.
But are follower counts really only a vanity measure?
I know it’ll be controversial for me to say that they’re not in certain circumstances.
Let me set up a scenario for you – consider when a new Ideal Customer comes to your feed for the first time. Would they interact/buy from a business with only a few hundred followers? If it were a relatively new account sharing content they found useful, they would likely stick around to see if the offering interested them. But would they feel the same way if they came across a low follower count on a feed that’s been around for awhile?
Follower counts might not carry the same weight it did when we were all first started using social media. But the reality is that follower counts, just like the amount of likes and comments, are quick visual indicators of a brand’s trustworthiness on social media. We shouldn’t be quick to discount the impact that a low follower count can have on a small business’ credibility.
What to do instead: Don’t buy followers, don’t buy followers and don’t buy followers. Bought followers + low engagement (likes and comments) are a dead giveaway that you’ve cheated. Instead, grow your following by:
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- Putting your business out there and actively engaging with your Ideal Customers
- Following and DMing Ideal Customers with genuine messages inviting them to get to know you eg. “Hi ____, we love your feed. We do XYZ and would like to connect!’
- Filtering through their followers and identify similar accounts/Ideal Customers
- If they’ve been active recently, repeat 2-3
- Following hashtags in your niche and repeat 2-4
Myth #4: You don’t need a website when you’ve got social media
For small businesses using social media as their only digital presence, I dare you to tell me anything more heart stopping than a platform outage or an account being suspended.
Go on. I’ll wait.
It’s true that social media outages get fixed quickly and platforms don’t ban accounts for no reason. But Instagram deleting accounts has happened before and how about Facebook banning Australian media publishers from sharing news on their accounts earlier in the year? This is the type of chaos that small businesses don’t want to be caught up in.
In fact, these shenanigans had the digital community in a bundle of nerves, asking the question of who really owns social media audiences.
The blunt answer is not you – you don’t own your social following. You don’t even have your followers’ names or contact details.
When a small business banks on using social media as their sole means of communicating with their customers and community, they expose themselves to a level of risk that can be easily mitigated if they diversified their marketing mix.
What to do instead: Complement your social media efforts with marketing activities you can ‘own’. Two key ways to access your own audience is through:
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- Building a website and leading your Ideal Customer to it through social media
- Use a lead magnet like a free offer to encourage email list signups when they arrive on your site
- Include increasing email sign ups as a marketing goal, so you can build and communicate with your audience on your own terms