The Biggest Mistake Businesses Make On Social Media

As a business owner, you’re looking at social media marketing like any other initiative — you’re keen to get involved, but only if it offers clear ROI for your business. And so you go on to make the biggest mistake you could possibly make on social media: you try to cash out too soon.

“But wait a minute,” you say, eyes squinting. “If I’m investing in social media for my business, isn’t the whole point to make my money back?”

Yes! But the worst way to do that is to explicitly sell your products to people before you’ve provided them any value.

People use social media to get news, to follow friends, and to start conversations, so don't be surprised if you find it difficult to fit in with your self-promotional sales content.

A business that uses social media just to shout about their own product or service is like that one kid that won’t stop splashing in the pool, even after they’ve been asked to stop. All the other kids shake their head and share a knowing look, stepping farther and farther away to leave you a wide enough radius to splash by yourself.

You don’t want to splash solo. You may actually get some folks wet, but you also piss a lot of people off.

So how do you effectively engage others on social media and spark some real conversations? How do you build an engaged audience that will want to actually purchase from you long-term?

Many experts will have you believe the answer is pull the attention off yourself and share other peoples’ content. A few examples:

• The Golden Ratio (30/60/10) suggests 30% of the content you share should be content you create, 60% should be curated from elsewhere, and 10% should be promotional with calls to action.
• The Rule of Thirds suggests your social media updates should be evenly split between content that’s A) about or by you B) curated from others and C) personal interactions that build your brand.
• The 4-1-1 Method recommends four pieces of content curated from others, and one retweet for every one self-serving update.

This certainly appears to be an improvement. If the goal is to use social media to provide value to your target audience and spark conversations, then sharing the very best content from experts in the industry would be a sound route to go. (At least the other kids will play with you in the pool, rather than leaving you alone!)

But let’s not forget your whole goal of using social media. You’re looking to get a return on your investment. You want to drive people back to your website as much as possible so you can send them down your sales funnel. How can you do that if you’re mostly sending them to other experts’ sites and other businesses’ content?

In other words, why not create and share your own valuable content and turn your business into the go-to expert?

To build an audience for yourself, you have to provide some sort of unique value. You need to have a compelling reason for others to follow you, engage with you, like your content, and link to your website. As Gary Vaynerchuk says, you need to give, give, give without expectation.

Of course this isn’t something that happens with one article, one video, or one white paper. It’s a frame of mind, a holistic framework that encompasses how you work as a business owner.

If you can create a large enough reservoir of truly valuable content for your target audience, you’ll have plenty of fuel to drive consistent activity across a number of social media channels. You’ll be giving your audience plenty of reason to organically interact with you, share your content, link to your website, and send others down your funnel for you.

In other words, you won’t need to resort to splashing around by yourself to get people wet.

It takes just as much effort to plan an awesome party as it does to splash by yourself all day along. But instead of pissing people off, you get people jazzed to stop by and get wet. And if it’s truly great, those people will talk up your pool party to their friends too.

By providing enough value consistently to your audience, you actually turn your followers into ambassadors. So make your social media feeds the next great pool party. After a few great events and enough thrilled partygoers, you’ll have a line of people our your door eager to make a purchase.

Originally published on Forbes.com.

Stop Delegating Social Media to Your Interns

You know social media can be a valuable tool for your business -- you just haven’t found the time to prioritize it. But then it hits you.

“I’ll just get an intern to help!” After all, it’s a cheap solution and those college kids know everything about that social media thing. It sounds plausible, and yet, it could be one of the worst mistakes you make for your business.

Consider this: after a Google search, social media is often the very next place potential customers, investors and employees look before deciding to work with you.

An effective social media strategy earns you the attention of industry influencers, drives interested visitors back to your website and increases conversions. But an ineffective social media strategy will make your company look uneducated, impersonal or unhelpful. Poorly managed social media channels irritate customers, make employees second-guess their affiliation with your company and get people talking about you for all the wrong reasons.

In short, your social media presence is a digital window into your company and its operations. That’s a lot of responsibility for an intern who A) doesn’t have the experience to manage social media for a business and B) doesn’t know nearly enough about your business to represent you authentically online.

A good social media manager is not just someone who owns a smartphone and happens to enjoy social media in their personal life. Just because you watch TV doesn’t mean you can produce television ad campaigns, and the same is true for social media.

It’s far too easy to accidentally make your company look dumb online to delegate social media management to a newbie. Too much automation? You look impersonal. Using social media as a sales megaphone? You come across as spammy. To make matters worse, all it takes is one wrong tweet, one politically incorrect statement, one incorrectly used hashtag, to get your customers shaking their heads in frustration.

When your customers decide to use social media as an outlet to complain or ask questions, will your intern know enough to handle those problems? Will they know when to answer those queries directly and when to direct them to your customer service department? Or will your customers get ignored, and turn, frustrated, to your competitors. (“At least they answer my questions,” they’ll grumble.)

Interns are short term solutions. They work for a few months to get some entry-level experience in your industry. There a real risks having your social media manager just figuring it out along the way.

Perhaps you’ve delegated social media to an intern or are thinking of doing so. You aren’t putting many resources behind your social media presence, and think of it as something you “should be doing” rather than an opportunity to expand your company’s reach online.

Consider this a wake up call. As the business owner, you’re ultimately responsible for the success of your company. You’re responsible for putting the right pieces in place and supporting the initiatives that will help your company thrive.

If you haven’t really bought into the idea of social media for your business, then you’ll have a newbie managing your platforms and you’ll wonder why you can’t get social media to work for you. Instead, take social media seriously, as you would any other communication and marketing initiative.

Give social media the respect it deserves. Accept its pros and cons, its benefits and consequences. Understand its power to market your business, engage with customers, and influence public perception. Realize its opportunity to easily answer client questions and respond to customer complaints...or not. Get excited by the opportunity to rise above the noise and situate yourself as a go-to leader in the industry.

How you choose to use social media will have long-term consequences for your business, either good or bad. That’s not a job to be delegated to a short-term labor solution. There’s certainly nothing wrong with involving your interns in your social media activity, but do yourself a favor and leave management to the experts.

The Grinch: What Happened AFTER He Stole Christmas?

Have you Googled the Grinch recently? Go ahead, take a look.

His search results are abysmal. Nearly the entire first page is clouded by allegations of him “stealing Christmas.”

And why? Just because he wanted his neighbors to keep it down a bit?

Now, I know what you’re thinking. And I agree — the Grinch did actually break into all those houses and run off with presents, ornaments, and trees. It was a very regrettable thing that he did.

But the Grinch gave back everything he stole, publicly apologized, and was forgiven by all of Whoville. And despite having righted his wrong, the Grinch is haunted to this day by the online reflection of that act. In fact, he’s famous for it.

The Grinch’s Current Situation

I did a little digging and discovered that the Grinch is an experienced tailor with his own tailoring business. (He’s quite talented too — he made his own fitted Santa suit and Santa hat for that shameful act, complete with flared collars and cuffs.)

Unfortunately, there’s nothing online about his business — just the negative information about his thievery. Given that 81% of shoppers conduct online research before making a purchase, the Grinch’s online presence is likely a very influential deterrent for most of his customers.

And it’s not a minor issue for him either. The Grinch gets Googled roughly 200,000 times each month — and 5 times that amount come Christmas time! He’s losing tons of business just by virtue of what people find about him online.

It doesn’t have to be that way. If I were to take on the Grinch as a client, I’d propose the following steps to improve his online presence and turn that huge search volume into new business leads.

Opportunities for Immediate Improvement

Before we start creating any new online properties for the Grinch, I’d want to make sure that we fix what’s already out there. There’s a lot of room for improvement.

First, Wikipedia. The majority of the Grinch’s Wikipedia page is inappropriately negative with biased phrases like “grumpy, anti-holiday spirit” and presumptuous statements like “He scorns the Christmas season…apparently irritated by the happiness of others and deriving pleasure from spoiling other people's merriment.”

This kind of language is much more reminiscent of a tabloid than a Wikipedia page.

Wiki guidelines explicitly state that Biographies of Living Persons ("BLPs") must be written conservatively, neutrally, and with regard for the subject's privacy. That’s a fancy way of saying that Wiki editors need to be really careful about the kind of information they put online about any living people. Luckily for the Grinch, any material that violates this rule may be removed immediately. So that’s step one.

The other piece of the Grinch’s online presence worth fixing ASAP are his social profiles.

It looks like he already has a LinkedIn and Twitter profile with his name in the URLs. The next steps would be to fill those profiles out with as much information as possible and connect with people in the Grinch’s existing network. These are two critical steps that will help those profiles rise in search results.

Creating New Properties

One of the biggest issues with the Grinch’s online presence is the lack of properties under his control. When people look him up online, the narrative is completely controlled by other people.

I highly recommend we create a website for the Grinch’s tailoring business, perhaps GrinchTailors.com. We’re up against some pretty nasty negatives, so we’ll want to do everything we can to get this site on the 1st page quickly. Building a page all about the Grinch (with his name in the URL) will help, and keeping an active blog will be good too. The content for the blog will be determined based on the Grinch’s audience, something I’ll have to find out when I speak directly with the Grinch.

I’d like to also get access to TheGrinch.com, which would serve as a personal website, a central hub of information for anyone interested in learning more or getting in touch. Visitors would be able to find the Grinch’s experience, his tailoring work, contact information, and client testimonials to mitigate the negative information that’s already out there.

Finally, we’ll want to reserve several social media properties, choices we’ll determine after hearing more about the demographic info of The Grinch’s target audience. To start, I’d recommend Facebook, Instagram, Crunchbase, Google+, and Youtube. Then we’ll need to optimize everything to maximize their potential for ranking in search results.

Press Opportunities and Media Outreach

The Grinch has decades of experience as a tailor and is well-known in the tailoring community but there’s absolutely no positive content out there that reflects that. Sure, we’ll want an active blog on his company and personal websites, but I’d also like to get him published on external publications to build his credibility as an expert in his field.

For starters, I’d like to pitch the Grinch as a contributing author to business publications like Entrepreneur and Forbes, and style publications like GQ and Esquire.

Next, I’d sign the Grinch up for online services like HARO and ProfNet Queries to find opportunities to secure valuable media coverage. I’d also like to connect with mid-level fashion and style bloggers to secure opportunities for collaboration.

And that’s really just the start. Once we start earning a foothold in the 1st page of organic search results, we’ll enjoy a snowball effect. More traffic on The Grinch’s web properties means more people engaging with his positive content instead of the negatives. More engagement means more conversions back to his tailoring website and more improvements in search results. And the cycle continues.

I know I can help turn the Grinch’s online presence around. I just need to get ahold of the guy. Tell him to give me a shout if you see him. I’ll give you a referral bonus.

A No-Nonsense, 5-Step Guide to Success In the Digital Era

Let’s face it, the digital space is a wild and dangerous place. A single tweet can cost you your job and a bad customer experience can quickly become your worst PR nightmare.

Given the huge risks, isn’t it frustrating that everyone has an opinion about your company’s digital strategy? Any schmuck with a smartphone is suddenly a digital marketing expert.

It’s impossible to know what’s important and what’s not. Should you take advantage of content marketing or is it a waste of your time? Should you tweet three times a day or three times a week? With so much conflicting advice, it’s no wonder business owners everywhere are struggling to maximize their digital efforts.

Your family, friends, and all of the marketing blogs are dead wrong. I alone hold the secret to digital success, and lucky for you, am charitable enough to share it!

Here are five clever steps I’ve developed to guarantee your business success in the digital era.

1. Stop sending email blasts. Send this instead.

After several drafts and revisions, your carefully crafted email is ready for delivery. Your marketing team has given you two amazing headlines to A/B test and you can’t wait for the positive response.

You send the email off and where does it go? Right into the trash folder.

Did you know that the average email only gets clicked three percent of the time? You are ten times more likely to be able to walk right into your customer’s unlocked home unannounced.

Now I’m not suggesting you do that -- that would be crazy. But youcan take advantage of this “open-door” policy without getting yourself arrested. I’m talking about a completely untapped marketing strategy that’s guaranteed to get your business the attention you need.

The secret? Ditch the emails entirely and send glitter bombs to your customers via snail mail.

People love glitter! It’s sparkly and fun. Women wear it on New Year’s and guys even put it on their beards. If you’re in a boring industry, glitter has the added benefit of generating more excitement than you possibly could by yourself.

Actions speak louder than words, so stop sending email blasts and start sending glitter blasts. Put your email marketing efforts on hold and dedicate your efforts toward a full-fledged glitter marketing campaign. People are guaranteed to pay attention.

2. Avoid social media at all costs.

You don’t have time to mess around on social media, you’ve got a business to run!

Would you have a baby and expect it to raise itself? Of course not. So why would you start an online presence when you don’t have the resources to nurture it and bring in qualified leads?

You might have heard that 80 percent of small and medium-sized businesses use social media to drive their business growth. Sure, but did you also know that 80 percent of businesses fail within 18 months? Coincidence? I think not.

Remember, the internet is a dangerous world where online gaffes cause irreversible damage that no PR firm wants to handle. The best way to avoid these issues? Avoid social media altogether. Roughly 99 percent of top brands use Facebook, so this tactic will land you in the top 1 percent, the very cream of the crop.

As if that weren’t a good enough reason, remember that social networks are teeming with bots, spam, and fake followers. You’ll never convert a phony follower into a paying consumer, no matter how hard you try.

3. Ensure your website is old and out-of-date.

All the blogs say you need a modern a mobile-friendly company website. It’s a good thought, but allow me to propose an alternative.

Sure, more than half of website traffic comes from mobile devices. But that leaves a good chunk of traffic that doesn’t come from mobile. Plus, everyone and their grandma is hopping on the responsive design bandwagon now. Why not try the opposite to distinguish yourself from the competition?

In other words, make your website an antique.

There are TV shows dedicated to antiquing and towns that are famous specifically for their antique markets. I know this because the women in my family have an uncanny ability to locate these markets and dedicate whole afternoons there.

So how can you take advantage of this untapped business opportunity? You make your website as mobile un-friendly as possible. See if you can give your site that old, 90s flair that makes it feel optimized for a slow connection on Netscape 3.0. That is, your site should be mostly text on a patterned background with a few cheesy graphics of your choice.

Don’t bother with a blog -- nobody reads anymore Anyway -- and see if you can avoid a clear call to action. People love guessing games. Making your call to action obvious is like giving away the punch line of a joke before you’ve had a chance to tell it properly. Don’t be that guy.

4. Neglect your search results.

You might have heard the stats -- 97 percent of consumers search online for products and services and half of them start on search engines.

So if 97 out of 100 consumers will be looking for you online, why should you completely neglect your search results?

It’s the same reason Hermès sells a limited supply of its handbags and it’s the same reason De Beers manually controls the international diamond supply. Luxury brands have learned the art of cultivating exclusivity by limiting brand access to their consumers.

You can do the same with your business. By neglecting your search results, consumers will have trouble finding your company’s most important information. You’ll restrict access to the information consumers want most, suddenly making your product, service, or experience extremely rare, and therefore extremely valuable.

5. In general, take up as little space online as possible.

Imagine your morning routine. If you’re like the average American, you wake up and check your phone. You shower and check your phone. You probably spend more time checking emails in the morning than eating breakfast. And then you go to work and hop online for six to eight hours.

The average person spends eight hours and 41 minutes on electronic devices. That means we’re spending more time on our laptops and phones than we are sleeping!

The result? People’s backs are hurting, their eyes are getting worse and their social anxiety and depression is off the charts.

The last thing you want to do is encourage that kind of behavior with your business practices.

Instead, your goal should be to keep your business out of the online space entirely. After all, you want people to spend time shopping at your business, not surfing the web and damaging their health.

As the trend for corporate social responsibility continues to blossom, this kind of digital strategy will perfectly position your business to garner trust from responsible consumers.

If you can do good in the world and make money in the process, then why not? By shrinking your digital presence, you’ll encourage safer habits, attract more clients, and ultimately, boost profits.

--

Originally published on Entrepreneur.com. Image credits: slate.com, shutterstock.

4 Tips to Supercharge Your Company’s Online Presence

These days, a business’s online brand is just as important as what happens offline.

Your company’s digital presence can be a deal maker or a deal breaker. An uncared-for brand turns consumers away in frustration. But an all-star brand can attract leads, expand your reach, increase brand awareness, and ultimately boost sales.

Even if you get referrals through word-of-mouth, you can bet those folks are going to search your business online and interact with it digitally.

Most companies don’t handle these interactions effectively. And even fewer do so in a way that promotes the company’s brand positively and improves the customer experience. That means that a stellar online brand and active digital presence can be a huge competitive advantage.

Let’s explore four ways to supercharge your company’s online brand.

Look Beyond Facebook

Sure, Facebook is still the global giant when it comes to social networks, but it’s not the most effective way to expand your reach. Growing your audience organically is an iterative process. It requires testing on other social channels, which means you have to actually be on other social channels. To learn more about this, sign up for the upcoming Score workshop.

LinkedIn and Twitter are obvious choices. If you haven’t done so already, go ahead and create a company page. If kept active, this will help you build brand credibility and connect with potential investors. There are loads of social channels out there so be discriminating as you choose which ones to tackle. Your business doesn’t need to be on every one, but it does need to be on more than one.

Start a Blog

There’s a reason content marketing has exploded over the last several years. B2B marketers that use blogs receive 67% more leads than those that do not. And marketers who have prioritised blogging are 13x more likely to enjoy positive ROI.

Think about it — popular content is a terrific way to attract customers. If someone Googles a question about your industry and your awesome content comes up, that’s a valuable entry point. Offer consumers high quality content on a regular basis, and they’ll come to trust you as an authoritative source of information in your industry. That association is worth its weight in gold.

Respond to Feedback, Both Positive and Negative

Negative feedback can be scary. But responding to negative feedback is all about taking responsibility. If someone complains about your business on social media, that’s bad. But left ignored, that complaint can be even worse.With a quick response, you can diffuse the situation, give context to the complaint, and even win a customer back. Remember to remain polite and see if you can explain how you’re going to remedy the situation in the future.

Don’t be afraid to respond selectively to positive feedback to. You don’t want to be seen as overly eager or arrogant, but the right comment can solidify the loyalty a customer feels with your brand. If a customer loves a particular aspect of your company, you can use that as an opportunity to generate excitement about something new in the pipeline.

Improve Online Presence for Management

People are going to look up your business and they’re also going to look YOU up. Consumers want to know the entrepreneur behind the curtain, and a quick Google search is the easiest way to do that. If your online brand doesn’t match your business, you’ll reduce the impact of your brand message. Take steps to improve your own online presence and ensure that your digital footprint helps to promote your company, rather than detract from it. Even if your search results aren’t particularly negative, there are some convincing reasons to build up your presence proactively.

Closing Note:

At the end of the day, your potential customers are just regular people and so are you. Appeal to their humanity, be personable, and show that you’re human too.

A version of this article appeared originally on Score New York City.

Find Your Social Media Influencers & Make the Most of Them

Social networks are a wild and noisy place. With 350,000 tweets sent every minute, it can be difficult to break through all that noise. Social media influencers can help.

The influencers are the power users. They are the experts and thought leaders with huge followings and trusted opinions.

These people are sharing content likes yours every single day. There’s no reason why your content should go unnoticed. Let’s take advantage of these influencers’ audiences and make them work to our benefit.

Define Your Influencers

Image credit: yourstory.com

First, we’ll need to define our influencers.

One obvious way to define influencers is by the size of their audience, but we all know how deceiving that can be. Instead, I prefer to choose influencers who are consistently active, have a high level of engagement for niche topics, and have a dedicated and growing group of followers.

Sound difficult? Luckily we don’t need to reinvent the wheel here.  

Find Your Influencers

Image credit: apollotarget.com

I like using RightRelevance to find my influencers because it makes this process incredibly easy. RR uses a pagerank-like algorithm that assigns a rank/score to influencers based on topical contribution and expertise. Just plug and play.

Open up RightRelevance and type in a category that’s related to your industry or niche.

For me, I’ll try 'personal branding.'

Add it as a saved channel so you can refer back to it later.

Then click the influencers tab and decide whether you want to filter by people or organizations. I want to target individuals, so I’ve clicked the “Person” option.

Finally, decide if you want to tailor it even further by location. Then scroll down and find the influencers that interest you. Make a list so you can revisit it later.

Don’t forget to switch to a new category and repeat the process. I’ve already used “personal branding,” but I could also try “reputation management” and “content marketing.

PS: If you’ve been active on Twitter for a while, check out your analytics page and find the top mention over the last few months. You might find an interesting trend.

Engage With Your Influencers

Image credit: dyanmiccloudsrv.com

Influencers want the same thing you do -- engagement.

So give it to them!

Interact with their content and participate in the conversations they start online. Share their articles, retweet their posts, and comment on their blog posts. The goal should be to become a genuine part of that person’s community.

The point is to get yourself noticed. With a little luck, the influencers you target will interact with you, retweet your content, and might even link back to you in an upcoming article.

Get Influencers to Share Your Posts

Remember, these influencers are already sharing content just like yours. The key is to get them to notice your content over someone else’s.

Reach out to them -- via email, Twitter, etc. -- and share your recent article.

Make it short and sweet. Link to your article, explain why they might be interested and thank them. Get in and get out. The shorter the better.

When I shared 12 Twitter Tools to Take Control of Your Online Reputation, I emailed and/or tweeted people from every single company on that list. I got retweets from Canva, Buffer, RiteTag and a handful of others. Their enthusiasm completely catapulted my article without much of my own additional effort. Totally worth the 10-15 minutes.

Maintain Relationships with Your Influencers

Now that you have a list of influencers, make a point to revisit it. Reach out and interact with these people from time to time. Stay on top of their latest blog posts using a tool like Hootsuite Syndicator or Google Alerts.

These simple gestures are a great way to stay on their radar and show the value you place on the relationship. With enough social media influencers on your side, you’ll be well on your way to becoming an influencer in your own right.