Stop Talking About Yourself So Much on Social Media and Listen

Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, Oh my! Now entrepreneurs have so many ways to reach out and talk to the world. Entrepreneurship is all about building a platform of loyal advocates who are excited about listening to your message and hopefully buying from you. social media marketing b2b That said, the five biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make on social media all come down to one important lesson: You talk too much (at least on social media). Stop talking and start listening and you will turn your use of social media into a lean, mean, money-making, advocate-building, client-relationship machine. Stop humanizing your brand" doesn't translate to "be stuffy and corporate." It just means you should consider the differences between humans and brands, and act with discretion."Humans bicker, brands shouldn't; humans behave frivolously, brands shouldn't," Joe Chernov, vice president of marketing for Kinvey, says in the book.Chernov goes on to say that humanizing a brand was good advice initially when brands acted too corporate on social media, but now, "I see brands sharing absurdist memes or making politically charged statements, and I realize it's time to reintroduce a measure of sobriety into our corporate feeds. It happens some customers aren't always happy with your product, website, what you wrote on the blog, the way you handled something, etc. But you shouldn't ignore them simply because the two of you don't see eye to eye."If we have the opportunity to engage in dialogue with one of our users, we will usually have a fan for life," said Ethan Austin, co-founder of GiveForward, social media marketing courses in the book. He admits that most of GiveForward's most loyal users were once complainers. "We treat every email, complaint, or inquiry about the site as an opportunity to inject humanity into the conversation and win over a customer," says Austin."Now, granted," Spark added, "if they respond back, 'You're a moron. Go away,' don't respond. But if it's a thoughtful response, obviously you respond.

Pivot from always using your lips not your ears

Most entrepreneurs use social media as their lips, not their ears. Instead of spending 30 minutes a day posting, spend that time scrolling through posts by friends, followers and potential clients to see what’s going on in their lives. social media marketing software When something awesome is happening in the life or business of one of your followers, act on it! Send a card or pick up the phone to acknowledge it. I spend 30 minutes a day scrolling through my social-media feeds to see what’s happening in everyone else’s lives. When I see anything at all, like a celebration or a challenge in their life, I consider this to be a prompt that I must act upon. If there is anything that the growth of Google has taught us, it is this: the internet highly values organization, aggregation and search. It’s still mind boggling that a simple search box and a back-end algorithm turned into one of the world’s most dominant companies, valued now at more than $395 billion.But when you think about it, it makes perfect sense. Before the search engine rush that resulted in Google's dominance, the internet was a scattered landscape of millions of pages that viewers had to hunt-and-peck through. After Google, through one simple search bar, every topic on the internet was at a person’s fingertips. This history is repeating itself in the social media universe. The amount of data that streams through social sites is breathtaking. Every minute, Facebook users share more than 685,000 pieces of content, Twitter users shoot out 100,000 Tweets, and YouTube subscribers upload 48 hours of video, according to Mashable data.Just like the early days of Google, social media marketing manager social media users, brands and marketers are still trying to make sense of this torrent of social media information. And just like Google’s simple search bar, one elegantly efficient solution is making that happen the hashtag. The simple pound sign is now used across social networks, making sense of a complex social media world fractured into multiple platforms and multiple media.

Too good for social media? Forget that

Surprisingly there are still individuals and companies that are resisting social media. Wow, these individuals and firms are missing out on a free opportunity to build a following. social media marketing strategies I’ve had conversations with business owners like this and the big reason they have resisted social media is because they personally hate social media. My advice to them is to get over it!I know lots of entrepreneurs who hate selling yet they realize that this activity is so fundamentally important to their business that they figure out a way to get good at it just as they should do with social media.To build a tribe, you must be accessible in a way that people can easily learn about you and your business. The easiest way to do this is through social media. There’s a good chance that your competition is eating it up on social media, and so should you! Using the hashtag, marketers can now aggregate social content and reach social users across Facebook, Twitter, Vine and Instagram with a single campaign.It has also transformed the way that marketers tie social campaigns into their overall marketing strategy. Through a simple hashtag, brands can now collect, curate and aggregate user-generated content into cohesive social campaigns. And by putting a hashtag as a call-to-action in a traditional advertisement, social campaigns are now taking a central role in how brands execute and follow up on traditional advertising.Super Bowl advertising was perhaps the most visible example of this growing hashtag phenomenon. More than half of the ads used hashtags, using social media for marketing and brands including RadioShack used hashtags such as InWithTheNew to drive awareness about monumental business decisions a modernization and re-structuring of the company that will define the future of the electronics retailer.The integration of a central hashtag in the campaign that announced a major new direction for the company caused Advertising Age, in a column following the Super Bowl, announce, “In Shocking Upset, RadioShack Wins the Super Bowl.