A professional business plan is a statement which contains background information on business goals about an organization or a team attempting to reach these goals. The construction of a professional business plan is vital for a business to succeed. Social media is the ideal advertising platform for businesses, but if not used properly it could do more damage to the business than good. Below are 10 social media mistakes that might kill your small business plan.
1. Not Having a Proper Marketing Strategy
When planning for business marketing a solid strategy must be made in advance, this not only enables you to see if your efforts are working but also helps you determine your business goals a professional business plan must contain a marketing strategy which includes social media but not be exclusive to it. Social media should be just one platform on your overall business plan with an ultimate goal of constant and consistent social media presence.
2. Not Having a Consistent Brand
Visually, the brand has to be kept consistent across various marketing websites and applications. The logo, the brand message and colors have to be in harmony between a Facebook page and a twitter or a website page, the indication of them being related to one another has to be kept. It is important that you present the same message across different social media platforms. Brand recognition is also very important, be sure to give a clear understanding of the business and its values when creating the advertisement, make sure that you do not post things that may cause contradictions to take place or give an incorrect opinion of your business.
3. Not Clearly Defining Your Target Client Profile
A professional business plan must have a clear vision of who you want to attract as your clients, knowing your target market allows you to optimize your posts and gain the attention of the people who are willing to do business with you. This prevents you from posting uninteresting posts causing your followers to leave as a result.
4. Stealing Content Without Crediting
Never post stolen content from other websites, not only that this can be embarrassing if caught, but not giving the proper credit, or asking for proper permission can also cause many legal difficulties; there are situations where businesses have been sued for copyright infringement and video theft.
5. Inappropriately Responding to Any Negative Feedback
Negative feedback is due to happen at some point, you can choose to take it in stride, ignore it or fight it, however, the way you respond in will have an ultimate effect on your business, and be it good or bad. Most of the times complaints coming from customers are due to frustrations with your product, rather than ignoring these complaints, listen to them and use them as an opportunity to improve. Respond thoughtfully to showcase your commitment to the customer, this can help you make great long term customers. While having a preformed response for the most commonly asked questions can save you time use them with caution, criticism, and negative feedback should be generally met with personalized and thoughtful messages.
6. Not Spending Ad Money Wisely
Social media is an affordable advertising platform open to all but most small businesses are doing wrong on social media is blindly spending money in an attempt to grow is a grave mistake. For example: just because Facebook marketing can be cheap, this does not mean you should spend all your money on Facebook ads. A professional business plan is a key, lay the ground work before spending money on social media adverts, understand your audience and your goals, and your ad content, choose the platform which appeals the best for your audience and importantly track the results of your advertisements.
7. Spreading Yourself Too Thin
Committing to too many networks is not an effective idea if you can keep up then very good, but if not this can cause you to spend your valuable resources and time in vain. Choose the top three, top five sites that best match your client base and fully commit. Form a regular posting schedule on these few sites, having a few fully committed sites is much better than letting many sites lie dormant and ineffective.
8. Boring Content
Your content has to be interesting for your audience to stick around, for example, if you post the same type of content over and over again this shows your followers that you simply do not care about posting engaging content, creativity is key. Change things up, have a wide variety of content.
9. Over Posting
With twitter, yes you can post a lot of tweets a day, but this may not work on other social media platforms. Posting too much can be annoying to your followers; this is a quick way to lose them. The best way is to use a regular posting schedule and stick to it, do not overload your audience with content.
10. Not Responding
If your followers stop by and comment on your posts always take the time to get back to them, if you do not they will stop commenting and become less engaged with you, this is the first step to losing followers. Start building a community.
Social media requires you to interact with people, also use your time and resources wisely and reply to followers and fans in a professional and thoughtful manner.
