Small business owners have undoubtedly been given a huge boost by social media marketing. Facebook in particular has become a prominent tool used by small business owners to promote their business. But a lot of them aren’t reaping the kind of benefits that they should from the platform due to a few key mistakes.
1. Broadcasting instead of interacting
Facebook is about interacting with customers and fans. A lot of small business owners often use it to simply broadcast their messages and believe that it would be sufficient. However, unless your “fans” and followers know that their comments and messages on your business page’s walls are being read and responded to, they wouldn’t be inclined to visit your page.
2. Not putting in enough time
Unless you have some experience in small business marketing over the internet, chances are that you approach Facebook marketing as a “set and forget” deal. However, just having a social media page for your business and getting a number of likes isn’t sufficient to make this form of marketing effective for your business. Facebook is all about the social experience. You need to ensure that you check your business’ social media page at least once a day and that you spend enough time on it to gauge customer behavior, what they want and what interests them.
3. Being too predictable or boring
A lot of small business users tend to think of Facebook as just one of the tools in their overall marketing strategy and that they can use it within an automated system. However, this kind of a mindset often makes the posts and updates posted by a company age too boring or predictable for the fans and followers of the page. Small businesses need to learn that each post can have a tremendous impact on the fans and that a boring page is more likely to be hidden or unliked by users who don’t find it stimulating enough to have it on their news feeds.
4. Not learning about Facebook tools and mechanics
Facebook was probably the first social network to introduce a full fledged set of tools for business users and marketers. Most small business owners, however, simply aren’t aware of these tools and mechanics or do not take the time to familiarize themselves with them. This mentality usually stems from the false sense of confidence that being on the social media site as an individual user instills in them. Most small business owners believe that since they have mastered the use of Facebook as an individual user, they know all there is about how Facebook is used.
5. Violating the terms of use
Facebook has a proper set of rules for social marketers. First of all you need to create a business page for your business though most users simply create a personal page for their companies. Apart from this, tagging folks without their permission, not reading the rules about running contests etc. get you in deep trouble with Facebook and may even get your page banned. For small businesses that have invested a sizable amount of time developing these pages and building up fan bases, this could be quite devastating.
