4 common social media marketing myths

Social media marketing is fairly new to the business game (by fairly new, I mean a lot of people are really just starting to get it). In the last couple of years, more and more businesses are beginning to address their online presence. Just like anything, there are going to be a handful of misconceptions, so here are 4 common social media marketing myths.

My customers aren’t on social media

There are over 2 billion active users on Facebook, 330 million active users on Twitter and 800 million on Instagram. And you’re saying that your customers aren’t on social media? Your target audience isn’t just a small circle of people, it’s a massive variety of people worldwide. As almost everybody is online and owns at least one social media account, the probability that your customers are on social media is VERY high. It’s one of the main places to advertise and showcase your business/products.

You should be on every social media channel

Just because there are a lot of social media channels doesn’t mean you should join all of them. By all means, you can try them out and see which is best for your business, but for definite not every platform is suitable for you. You may find that certain platforms just don’t work for you or aren’t suitable for your audience, so the best thing for that is to not devote a lot of time to them.

A rule of thumb is to concentrate on the platform your audience is spending most of their time on. For example, if your audience is in the 15 to 19 year old demographic, you should be spending more time on Snapchat than you would on LinkedIn.

If my friends and family like every single post, my social presence will be amazing

Having your family and friends support your business through social media is great but you can’t get your content to show up in other people’s news feeds if only the same people are always interacting. You need a variety of different people interacting with your content to help grow your reach and to be seen by different people.

I need to hashtag everything

Hashtags are an essence of your social media posts, especially with Instagram. It’s reasonable to think that the more hashtags you use, the more engagement you will get and the more people will see your posts. But really it’s a matter of quality over quantity. Some posts with minimal hashtags can do better than posts with 30, so find hashtags that work for you and rotate them every now and again to keep the algorithm going.