Content You’re Posting That’s Costing Your Business
We should all know that having a social media presence for your small business is a must, but is the content you’re posting helping or hurting your business? Most of the businesses that work with us, and in general, don’t have a clear strategy for their social media marketing. They usually just post content that they’ve seen their competition or big corporations do and think that it will work for them. That or they’re doing their posts on the fly.
The sad part is, most of them are doing both.
While you have the best intentions for your marketing and for your clients, here are 5 ways that you’re undoubtedly hurting your brand and your bottom line by the posts you’re making.
1. Inconsistent Posting & Content Not Consistent With Your Brand
Let’s address the first part.
Consistency is at the top of your social media marketing plan. Your audience will become trained to a certain amount and type of content from you.
Think about this. Let’s say a new Italian restaurant opens up near you. Would you continue to go back if they had a new chef every month?
Or what about if they closed on random days of the week without warning?
People come to expect a certain level of service. A certain quality of product. If we’re varying in how well, how often or how much we deliver that product or service, we’re doing our business a disservice. We’re confusing the customers and they will find what they want elsewhere.
This is what it is like to have an inconsistent posting schedule.
Building off that same story is how it affects your brand to be inconsistent. Your business brand is much more than a logo and social media profile.
It’s the first phone call somebody has with your business.
The email signatures and frequency of emails they receive from you.
The greeting or lack thereof when they walk into your doors or check out your website.
All these things go into our brand. If you’ve started to establish a certain culture, environment, messaging, color scheme and anything else related to your business brand and then suddenly do something that is out of the ordinary, it will likely have a negative outlook by your audience.
2. Lots of Promotional Posts
You’ve heard us and others in the marketing space say this before and we will say it again:
Provide valuable content to your audience.
If the majority of your posts are sales, promotions or ads, people will either stop following you or your sales will drop.
Use the 80/20 Rule as your guide.
80% of your content should be value-driven.
20% of your content can be promotional.
Out of 5 posts, 4 of them should be educational, funny, entertaining, or interesting for your audience. The 5th post can be sales-related.
There’s a difference between a hard sell and a soft sell. Here are a couple of different examples.
Hard: Sign up in the next 48 hours or you’ll miss out on this deal.
Soft: (Testimonial Post) So if you want to get results like Karen did, send us a message and let’s talk about how we can help.
There should be a call to action in all of your posts. This is fine to add your soft sells but your hard sells and promotions should be in the 20%.
3. Spelling or Grammatical Errors
How wuld it look if every post that you mad was filled w/ speling errors?
People look at your business as professional and expect you to have an understanding of proper grammar, spelling & punctuation.
Your vs You’re
Were vs We’re
While it may not seem like a lot to you, one of the first things other people notice that we do not is spelling and grammar. People spot that quickly and are usually quick to let the writer or company know that their spelling is off.
Save yourself the emails by proofreading your work or sending it to an editor.
4. Hashtag Stuffing
We’ve all seen it. Those posts on Instagram where they dropped 30 different hashtags. Anything related to their business, they’ve added it in there.
While hashtags are important for Instagram & Twitter, it’s how people search for things and find new people, it’s also a bad look to overdo it.
Or those accounts that use the same 30 hashtags in every single post? Yeah. Excessive. No need to feel guilty if you have done it too. You probably didn’t enjoy putting out that many hashtags. Maybe it made you feel a bit inauthentic. I know I did when I was first starting out.
Instead, save 3-4 different bundles (10-15 hashtags per bundle) and use one bundle with your post. Maybe you still have 30 different hashtags overall but each bundle is separated so that you’re adding a variety to your posts.
Do your research on the hashtags you’re using. The ones who hundreds of thousands into the millions aren’t going to have the same impact as the ones with a few thousand to tens of thousands. Pick some more global terms as well as focused hashtags. Don’t forget to add some nearby cities.
This also brings us to our next point which is now sharing that hashtag-stuffed post to every social media platform you are on.
5. Same Message On All Social Media Platforms
This is another one that we’re all familiar with. Do you have your Instagram settings set to share your most recent post to Facebook & Twitter? Or vice versa from Facebook to Instagram?
Sharing Posts
As we discussed in our previous post, every social media platform wants its users to stay in their platform as long as possible. So when you “share” your post from Instagram to your linked Facebook page, it lowers the reach of that post because it wasn’t natively posted on Facebook. Same for LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. They all want native, original content.
Copy and pasting do not cut it either. Social media platforms are smart. They know how long you’re “typing in the box”. So if you copy and paste and then directly post, you’re telling that platform it isn’t made specifically for that platform so they will drop your rankings with their algorithms.
Language of Posts
Lastly is the importance of messaging on each platform. Every social media platform also wants to differentiate itself from the others. The language you use on Facebook is different from the language you use on LinkedIn. The posts you make on LinkedIn are different than that of Twitter.
We must think from the perspective of our audience and our client. When they check LinkedIn, the type of content they’re looking for is different than when they’re scrolling through their Facebook feed. So if we post the exact same thing on Facebook as we did on LinkedIn, it doesn’t have the same effect on that individual.
They want to feel like they’re getting value in a different way from each platform. Today’s consumer is evolving and becoming smarter. It appears lazy on our end if we just have the exact same thing on every single platform we post.
How to Share Posts Correctly
Here’s the trick to this. You can have the exact same graphics and message on your post of the day. It just needs to be reworded and positioned differently for the platform you’re posting it for. You want to talk to your audience how they want to be talked to, which is different for each platform.
I.e. Hashtags don’t work on Facebook like they do Instagram. So if you copy and paste directly from IG then you have all these hashtags at the bottom of your Facebook post. They will be able to tell automatically that it was from Instagram and also Facebook will dock you for trying to include hashtags into their platform.
Conclusion
Planning your posts ahead of time, we suggest on a monthly basis, will give you a better chance to be successful with your social media marketing. When we wing it and post things on the fly is when we get into trouble.
Our audience wants us to be consistent with our posts. The same thing applies to any marketing message. Podcast. Blog. Emails. Etc.
Take time to tweak your content to make sure it fits each platform instead of copy and pasting from platform to platform.
Be more valuable to your audience by selling less and you’ll be more successful when it does come time to sell.
If you are looking for help with developing your social media marketing or just want somebody to take it off your hands so you can focus on other things, lets set up a time to talk. Message us for more details.