The #1 Social Media Marketing Mistake Companies are Making

Are you sabotaging your own social media marketing and don’t even know it? Are you only getting 25 cents on the dollar spent on your social marketing program?

 It’s very likely that you’re NOT getting the bang for your buck, if you’re not communicating frequently with your social media market team; be it an in-house marketing team or hired guns. Unfortunately we see too frequently, it’s ‘hands off’ participation from company managers when it comes to their social media marketing program. Now if you have a very good social marketing team, this is OK to a certain extent; except for one thing…

Tell us what’s happening! We are one of those “hired guns” teams and it’s all too frequent that we hear about the “Big Sale” or “Special” or change in staff and or location until after it has happened, or just a day before it occurs.  I’m writing this pleading to the the marketing managers out there or the ‘poor soul’ who was assigned to communicate to us, PLEASE, please let us know what’s going on.

We think that some companies feel it’s a pay and forget operation. “Check off social media management, we have that covered now.” 

 Allow me to serve up an example of what we’re talking about. Recently, one of our clients had a big labor day sale. They contacted us via email to talk about some website changes they wanted and only after a couple of back and forth emails and phone calls, did we learn that they were having a ‘Blow Out’ sale. THE FRIDAY BEFORE THE SALE STARTED WE LEARNED THIS! So we jumped into action and loaded up their 15+ social accounts with ‘sale’ information and loaded up our Facebook and Twitter program with content to be broadcast over the weekend.

I got a call from the client on Tue morning saying that they had the best turn out ever for this sale. I said “yes, this social stuff really works when given a chance.” Imagine what would had happen if we had like 5 whole days to build up the sale? The history with this client is…they have total trust and satisfaction with our services, but despite repeated communication with the owner and his sales staff, they keep leaving us out of the loop.

What to do now? Hopefully the owner will (and he says he will) get’s us more involved. Lets get social! If you are a company owner or manager, or some poor employee who got tasked with the “Internet Marketing communication” chore, listen to this…Use your social marketing team. All you have to do is say “We are planing a sale on (date).” This communication will only take 5 mins of your time, but yield possibly a truck load of ROI. ROI means Money$. I hope we got your attention, because we want to work for you, work with you, but we need the information that only you have, to make this all work.

Here are some simple things to remember to help you captilize on your solcial marketing program…

• Communicate, Communicate, Communicate!
• There is no news that is small news. Social marketers are starving for content, sometimes making up stuff. If an employee gets a bonus, a raise or an award, and you share this with you social marketing team, the’ll eat it up for a day or two.
• A sale or special can keep your social marketing team busy for over a week.
• Moving our opening up a new office? Tell us about it! We can spin it to be a good move for you.
• New product, change in product? Now wouldn’t you tell us about this? Because you’re a re-seller is no excuse because you are the point of contact about this product to your clients, right? You are the product expert? Are you ‘in the know?’ Lets at least be in the game. It doesn’t take much effort. Let us work FOR you.
• Help us Help you

As we told our client last week, this social thing really works, IF given a chance. So…GIVE IT A CHANCE!

Guest blogger by: Ken O’Donnell
Owner of KO Websites
and West Coast SEO Pro’s
www.KO-websites.com