Avoid basic social media & website mistakes part 2

In the first part of our article ‘Avoid social media & website mistakes’ we covered the basic principles of what social media is and how small businesses should be doing it – but seemingly after nearly 20 years of it being a viable social tool, they still fail on all of the basics.

We conclude the article with the remaining five, finishing at no.1 and the reason for writing the post having borne witness to countless small businesses make these fundamental errors needlessly.

So, here goes;

5. Pointless posts – Not giving people a reason for reading or liking the post. Have a reason for the post – what do you want them to do – read more by visiting your website? Buy something from website? Call you? Have a clear goal in mind. Driving traffic TO your website from the social channels is really the best process. After all, the website will have a lot more information about you and what you do – sending people there and making sure they can contact you once they have reviewed the website is the path of Utopia.

4. Pointing people into social channel oblivion.  Having a van, truck or any other advertising material that just has the Facebook and Twitter icons on it and nothing else. Are Facebook and Twitter paying you to advertise their service on your promotional material? No. So give the potential customer a chance to read your amazing news and put the address in its simplest form, such as:

‘like’ us facebook.com/aubergine262  or better still,     /aubergine262

(Also see our previous point on Social Channel addresses (URLs) above.)

3. Posting too often. It’s basically spamming as you are barging into people’s personal space by posting every five minutes – it’s the quickest way to lose followers. You lose followers, you lose your audience and you’ll get a reputation as being a bit pushy. Nobody likes that. Once a week is more than enough for any business unless there is something incredibly important that must be announced.

2. Website contact forms that don’t work. Your main source of new web enquiries. When was the last time you checked it actually worked? It’s one of the most common things we hear ‘website enquiries are down – not sure why’. The enquiries are there, you just didn’t get them.

The reason the form stopped working could be many and you’ll need to remember that it may work today but a background update of the code or site may break it tomorrow. Checking it once a week or so takes 30 seconds and could save you from missing that all-important enquiry. At Aubergine if you have your website hosted with us, we do this sort of thing for you so you don’t have to worry. We keep the site updated with the latest code patches and make sure that you lines of enquiries are always working – if your current host doesn’t do that, they aren’t being a very good host now, are they?

and at No.1:

Not linking your ‘like’ or ‘follow us’ icons on your website to your actual social media pages. Just having the little blue square icons on your website will not magically transport the user to your social channel for an up-to-the minute news post. No. You actually need to link it and is the most common error we see website developers and owners fall foul to. It’s very often the last bit of info that gets forgotten when building a new website that never gets finished.

The other version is where the icons on a website just link to facebook.com or twitter.com. How is the person supposed to find your page from that?

Make it easy for people to find you.

We’re sure that we’ve got all the main offenders in our Top 10 of social media and website mistakes but the internet is a big place and so if there’s one that you see over and over and you want to tell us please visit our Facebook page: www.facebook.com/aubergine262 and post something up! Alternatively, you can Tweet us at www.twitter.com/aubergine262.