Anyone familiar with the world of online marketing will agree that social media should be a cornerstone of any good campaign. However, there’s a lot of misinformation out there regarding the best ways to truly leverage social media to increase brand presence and, ultimately, grow sales.
Related: Great content and your social media campaign
The following are some of the most common misconceptions about social media marketing:
1. Brands with older target audiences won’t have success with social media marketing.
This might have been true five years ago, but no longer. Recent studies indicate that an incredible 57 percent of Internet users between the ages of 50-65 are on Facebook. More than ever, you are likely to find older people on social media sites like Facebook and Pinterest, so you shouldn’t give up on social media just because you market your products or services to an older audience. You just have to adjust your tactics and messaging to engage these individuals.
2. Google+ is not worth the effort.
While it is true that Google+ has not taken off in popularity to the extent that many originally expected, there are still plenty of reasons to use it. Primarily, it’s good for search engine optimization (SEO). When someone searches for your business or organization on Google, your search rankings will typically be better if you have a Google+ profile.
3. The more often you post to Facebook, the better results you’ll have.
As with most things in business and in life, quality trumps quantity when it comes to posting on Facebook. If you post too often, you run the risk of annoying your followers, and they might drop your profile from their “likes.” To that end, you can lower your average number of likes, comments and shares, which may hurt your ranking per Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm. Post no more than once a day if you can help it, and make sure that you always have engaging and interesting posts. If you need help with this, work with a quality copywriting service.
4. Social media marketing is solely for advertising.
This mindset is the biggest reason why so many social media marketing campaigns fail. Brands can be so overly concerned with pushing out information or sales-driven copy that they forget the most important part of social media—it’s social in nature. You should be doing everything you can to interact with and engage your current and potential customers by starting conversations, replying to questions, creating surveys and more.
Driving engagement is the single most important part of social media marketing. Your primary goal should not be to push out as much marketing copy as possible about your products/services. Rather, your goal should be to provide good information and interesting ideas that pique the interest of your target audience.
5. Little effort is required in a social media marketing campaign.
Unfortunately, this is not true at all. There’s a lot of work that goes in to building a large following online to maximize the effectiveness of your campaign. And once you have that audience, you have to continually come up with new and interesting ways to keep people engaged. A great social media marketing campaign requires commitment and creativity at all times, often working hand-in-hand with a professional copywriter.
Social media marketing can be an outstanding tool for your business—if you use it correctly. Keep these common misperceptions in mind and remember to focus on engagement when using social media to promote your brand.
Tim Backes is a senior editor with ProPRcopy, a leading copywriting service that offers high-quality and affordable written content for companies and organizations around the world.