1. You think it’s free
It’s not free. It takes time, and if it’s taking someone’s time, that’s costing you money. To make it work you need to commit time to it! If you haven’t planned the activity into someone’s agenda then it won’t happen with any sort of consistency.
2. You’re not adding value
We meet lots of people who say ‘yeah we’re on X, Y, and Z.’ But when we investigate they haven’t actually posted anything of interest or value to their potential audience – they are broadcasting *shudder*.
3. It’s not integrated into your business
This is the most common ‘that’s so obvious’ statement. But most organisations don’t have any direct links to their social media, they don’t have it in reception showing recent tweets, they don’t invite their clients to engage with them on Facebook and they don’t signpost from their offline channels. To really see the benefit you need to think about how these communication channels can integrate into your existing systems and processes, and you will start to see a natural increase in your audience.
4. You’re not having conversations
‘Social shouters’ is our in house term for this, the people that constantly post outbound messages about their business or service, and re-tweet things that have no relevance or interest to me as a follower. They are not posting any original content, or getting involved in any conversations. Remember social media is a new way of engaging with people, if you wouldn’t do it in person don’t do it on a social network!
5. You aren’t taking it seriously
Whilst it can be hard to measure the bottom line impact of social media, most of the platforms allow you to measure it in some format. Just start with some basic metrics like number of followers, number of retweets, Facebook likes, or links to your website from your social platforms (this is standard stuff in Analytics). This will give you focus and a reason to engage and the results will follow. But you need to determine what your core objectives are to have a chance of knowing whether your social media is taking you in the direction you were hoping for.
These are all things that we see regularly when meeting and talking to businesses, and are areas that with proper planning, training, and measurability can be fixed quite easily.
There are lots of great articles out there that can help with this so get Googling, put some structure around your activity, and see how it impacts your results. I’m confident that these changes will change the way that social media is perceived within your business.