Last Updated on June 8, 2020
Social media marketing has lost none of its power over the years, but it takes some finesse to get it right. Why waste the effort spent building a social campaign when a critical mistake can hamper your progress? If you don’t fall for these five social media marketing myths, you’ll be headed in the right direction.
Myth No. 1: You Need a Ton of Followers
Reach, or the number of total followers you have, is definitely useful for getting your content seen. You should try to organically increase your reach over time. However, it’s all too common to overextend reach without considering engagement, which is illustrated by how many shares, comments, and likes your posts get.
When a business emphasizes followers over engagement, it can lead to a huge number of followers but virtually no engagement on posts, which means that all of those followers are worth hardly anything. Remember: social media isn’t about impressing people with numbers, it’s about community. Plan out ways to measure and track engagement as you build followers, aiming for a certain ratio of engagement to followers. If it starts to drop, think about what posts people liked the most and do more of that. Be willing to experiment.
Myth No. 2: Social Media Is All That Matters Now
While it’s great to get excited about social media marketing and take it seriously, that doesn’t mean you should abandon other forms of online marketing, especially if they’ve been working for you. Email marketing, webinars, blogging, live-streaming, and other tactics have the potential to synchronize with social media and go viral.
Try to find ways to mix what you’re using, and you’ll see bigger results on all sides. Too often, marketers assume that some tactic is dead in the face of something new, when in reality, a holistic approach can combine the reach of everything you use.
Myth No. 3: Your Business Has Nothing to Post Besides Products
On social media, what matters most is providing value. If your business only posts advertisements for its own products, think about that from an outsider’s perspective. Skilled marketers on social media have come up with creative ways of entertaining and intriguing people, increasing awareness in a brand without constantly selling. It’ll take some audience and competition analysis and some testing to find what works, but the learning period will be worth it.
Social media is a form of content marketing, and content must have something about it that people find valuable. Content can tell an engaging story, inspire people, make them laugh, and give them valuable information. What can you give your audience through social content that they’d appreciate enough to follow you, share the content, and maybe try your products?
Myth No. 4: Keep It Positive All the Time
Being authentic is surprisingly rare on social media. Sure, it might seem risky to drop the happy, positive attitude, but it’s also realistic and human. Sometimes you’ll get much more engagement from saying what you feel needs to be said, such as calling out conventional wisdom or acknowledging a flaw in your industry.
Avoid the corporate language and be real with people, because that’s what it takes to build connections. When someone responds negatively, respond back. When competitors do something wrong, call them out on it. Even if you do something wrong, don’t ignore it. This will make your followers see you as a person rather than a faceless brand, winning you more long-term fans.
Myth No. 5: Influencer Marketing Is for Huge Brands
In influencer marketing, you might see a business get an endorsement from someone with a following, usually through content marketing such as social posts. It’s easy to see a celebrity in a soda commercial and think influencer marketing is only for huge brands and famous people to work together, but that’s not true. Influencer marketing happens at all scales, with everything from fresh startups to multimillion-dollar businesses getting social posts, blogger reviews, and more to expand their visibility.
Let’s suppose a new bookstore is looking to get more customers. The bookstore reaches out to local bloggers who have a passion for reading and literature, and some agree to make blog posts about the business advertising an upcoming store event and appear in person. For a modest payment on the bookstore’s side, this event becomes a huge hit. Several bloggers and all their fans fill the store and buy tons of books, establishing many lifelong customers.
It’s one thing to understand why social media marketing matters, but it’s another to learn how to make it work for your own business. The easiest and most reliable method for making social media work is to connect with the right influencers. However, reaching out on your own in the hopes that an influencer will respond is time-consuming and unreliable. Intellifluence makes it far easier for brands to utilize influencer marketing and reach their sales goals through an organized platform. If you’re looking for the fastest and most cost-effective form of social media marketing, try Intellifluence today.
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