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May 24 2018

Why Your Social Media Sucks

So you’ve committed to, and prioritized your social media presence. You’ve thought about your audience, found a ton of free image content you can use, and started posting pretty regularly… you think. It’s been about a month, and you’ve lost that determination that got you started in the first place. Your numbers are horrible. You dread logging in to Facebook because that little arrow indicating your weekly total reach is always red, always pointing downward.

So what gives?

You may be making some common, key mistakes. As a social media manager, there are major issues I see all the time in the world of small business social media marketing. Here’s how to avoid them:

YOUR POSTS ARE TOO LONG

Facebook’s character limit for a single post is 55,000, but from a marketing perspective, your posts should never, ever approach this limit. Except in rare circumstances, you should even avoid having the “See more…” button appear on your posts.

One guiding philosophy I use across all online marketing is minimize clicks. People have short attention spans online. If your potential customer has to click “See more…” just to finish your post, it is way more likely they’ll lose interest before they get to the content you really want them to see. Make your clicks count! The ideal post both avoids the dreaded “See more…” button, and links directly to your shop/website/article/where you want your customers to go.

What you almost never want to see on one of your posts.

You’ll have to experiment with each post to find how just how long you can make it. There is no official character count before “See more…” appears. It depends on a number of variables (how you attach your photo, the title of your link, size of your screen, etc…) To find out, write your posts in Facebook’s publishing tools, and save it as a draft. From there, you can view the post as it will appear in someone’s feed.

YOUR PROFILE IS CONFUSING

I can’t overstate the importance of having an optimized profile on each of your active platforms. Your profile is the place people go once they’ve already been hooked– either by a post they saw, or looking you up by name– and they want more information about you. This is your opportunity to show your best side, while also directing people towards your end goal.

Yet, all too often, I see incomplete profiles, too-long descriptions in the “About” section, and incomprehensible profile pictures.

On Facebook, the “About” section is best used as a space for a very short description of what you do–I’m talking one, maybe two sentences. These sentences should be both engaging and immediately answer the question, “so what exactly do they do?” A longer description can be put into the “Our Story” section.

Make sure you fill in all the relevant details for your business, too: phone number, business hours, address, and founded date, link to your homepage, etc. This is the kind of information people are looking for.

Instagram is a little different, because profiles have a lot less information. In order to optimize that limited space, the profile description should be even more engaging and descriptive. Feel free to use emojis and hashtags, if you can identify some that work well for your business. The space to link to your website is prized real-estate on Instagram. It’s the only opportunity to point folks in a direction, outside of Instagram’s “Story” feature. Linking to your homepage is fine, but you should consider changing it periodically, to match what you are posting about. Advertising a specific item in your online shop? Change your link to go directly to that item’s page! Now, when you post about it, you can caption the photo with “Link in bio.”

YOU FOLLOW TOO MANY PEOPLE

PDX Alliance for Self Care is a new, local non-profit that is doing their Instagram profile right.

On platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest, it’s so important to maintain a low follower to following ratio. These platforms use this ratio, in part, to determine “who to follow” recommendations. These suggestions are a key method of growing an audience.

And really, it comes down to a matter of trust and optics. As a potential customer, would you put more trust in a business that has 560 followers but was following 1100 people, or one that has 495 followers and following 460 people? It simply looks better to

have a lower ratio. It shows people that people are, in general, more interested in you.

One easy tactic to keep this ratio low is to only follow people that are already following you. Most social listening tools have automated this strategy, and allow you to toggle it on or off. But it’s not too difficult to do manually, especially in the early stages or if your overall audience is less than 1000 people.

 

It’s easy to make mistakes and oversights when first starting out in social media marketing. Even if you’ve made all of the mistakes I outlined above, I hope I’ve equipped you with the knowledge to fix them, so your numbers can improve. Rest assured, you’re still doing the right thing by getting serious about social media in the first place. After all, the first step to a successful online presence is an active one!

There are a host of further issues to explore. Social media marketing is an ever-evolving landscape, and it’s difficult to stay on top of things. We can help with that. With Upswept Creative, we’ll work closely with you as a partner in social media marketing. Together, we’ll build a presence that works. Reach out to us today!

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