Social Media for Small Businesses: 5 Newbie Mistakes

Using Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks is something many of us do every day, and it's easy and free to create a social media presence, so naturally many small businesses are experimenting with social media to promote themselves.  This makes lots of sense -- small businesses are inherently better at putting a human face on the goods and services they provide, and there's an authenticity that underlies their interactions with their customers does very well on social networks. Large companies spend big dollars trying to manufacture the right tone of voice, something that often comes naturally to small business owners that see their customers face-to-face every day.

Many small business are doing very well with a minimal investment of cash and effort into social media, but it's easy to inadvertently miss out on bigger opportunities by making one or more of these newbie mistakes. Don't let it be you!

Mistake 1. Spreading Yourself Too Thin

There are social networks galore, and it's easy to get overwhelmed and think you need to be everywhere at once. Make an effort to be focused about how you spend your time. Start with the basics: Facebook and Twitter. Create a Page on Facebook (Not a Profile or a Group!) and a Twitter account and start posting. See where your customers find you. If you have a lot of images to share, Instagram is great, as is Pinterest, especially if your business has an ecommerce component, and if video is something you are already doing, consider YouTube. Don't feel like you have to go out of your way to create special content for social media, at least to start out. Your audience will appreciate candid snapshots of everyday scenes at your place of business (especially if you have a restaurant or a retail location), as well as important updates about your business, and relevant links. Start small, see what works, and stay focused.

Mistake 2. Your Social Presence is Out of Touch with the Rest of Your Business

Do you have daily specials? Make sure that Facebook isn't showing the specials from last week. Did you cancel classes at your yoga studio, but forget to put it on Twitter? Or did you forget to link to your Facebook, Twitter, and other pages from your web site? When social media is out of sync with what's happening with the day-to-day life of your business, not only are you not serving your community with up-to-date information, you're letting them know that your social media presence is unreliable. If you're not sure what kind of things you should be posting about, take a few minutes and talk it over with yourself, your team if you have one, or a trusted friend. Think about the kind of events that are relevant to your business that should trigger updates, whether they are newsy or informative, and make sure you get in the habit of posting each time one of those events occurs. And finally, if you are making the effort to connect with your audience, make sure they know about it! Post a sign in your store/restaurant/office and link to your social presences from your web site and any emails you send out.

Mistake 3. Off-Topic, Overly Frequent, or Other Unwelcome Posts

Take a moment to visit Condescending Corporate Brand Page.  Now, don't post stuff like that.  Your audience has already seen literally 9 billion "Keep Calm" posters and 47,000 Harlem Shake videos, and 23 trillion other co-opted memes.  If you post this stuff, unless it is VERY unique and well-done and relevant to your business, you will lose your audience's attention.  The same thing will happen if you post every hour, and especially if you flood their streams with several posts in a row.  Not only is this annoying, but it's counter-productive, especially on Facebook, where the newsfeed algorithms (aka the rules that determine who sees your posts) are very picky about this type of behavior.  Spammy posts will cause the number of impressions your posts receive to drop severely.  I'll talk more about Facebook algorithms in a future post.  For now, be extremely considerate of your audience's limited attention span.

Mistake 4. Not Paying Attention to Feedback

Most likely you will get some feedback just interacting with people as your business. This is great! Embrace the feedback, whether positive or negative, and learn from it. Same goes for online reviews, whether those are on Yelp, HealthGrades, Amazon, or what have you.

Yes, there are some people who will never be happy, and it can be annoying when they take to the internet to let off steam in your direction. At some point, however, someone is probably going to bring up a legitimate issue. Don't pretend it didn't happen. Take a deep breath, process it, learn from it, respond, and try to make it right. There is nothing you can do that says "I am a reasonable, caring business owner" more effectively than addressing your critics in public with a timely apology and an offer to correct a mistake, if possible. Make sure your response is cool-headed and never put down the person bringing up the issue. If you offer to fix a problem in some way, be absolutely sure you follow through. And don't think you can delete the problem away. As a wise friend of mine likes to say, trying to get something off the internet is like trying to get pee out of a pool -- and when someone inevitably calls out the fact that you tried to scrub away a issue, people will only assume that you have things to hide. Not a good look.

It's also important to listen when your audience is telling you they want something more or something different. Pay attention when someone (or especially when more than one person) asks for a new service or product category, or a new location, or longer hours, or you could miss out on an opportunity to reach new customers, grow your business, or change direction in a potentially exciting and profitable way.

Mistake 5. Paying Attention to the Wrong Numbers

It's important to count stuff.  If you're a business person, the most important thing to count is how much money you net.  Having a million Facebook likes will net you exactly $0.00.  With that in mind, think carefully about what is valuable to your business now, and make every effort to quantify, measure, and enhance those things. Social media can help you get there, but it's not the end goal.

Different things are important to different businesses.  Maybe right now you want to build awareness of your business and get a lot of new customers.  Or maybe you have all the business you can handle, but you need it to be distributed more evenly throughout the year.  If you have a brick-and-mortar operation, local traffic is important.  If you sell stuff online, e-commerce sales conversions are critical.  Once you have determined what short list of things are important for you to measure, make sure you're tracking them to the best of your ability.  Some free tools for doing this in relation to digital and social media are Google Analytics (web site analytics so you can see where your visitors are coming from and measure sales, among other things), Bitly or Goo.gl for tracking clicks on links, and Facebook Insights.  On most social networks it's easy to see how many followers you have and how they are interacting with (retweeting, liking etc) your content.  Once you're tracking the things you've determined are important to you, take a snapshot of these numbers at some kind of regular interval.  Every three months is probably a good bet.   Compare them to previous periods and see what's going well, or not so great, reevaluate what you're doing, and make adjustments.  Over time, you'll be able to see what works well for you and what might not be a great investment of your time.