Many businesses are jumping on the bandwagon and getting on social media platforms but many companies, despite being matures users of social media, still make mistakes. Today, I’ll share five common social media mistakes that many businesses make, and should avoid.

1. Selling without first building a relationship

Some businesses start selling to everyone right after they’ve created their social media profiles. Even though direct marketing can work, it is highly impossible if a relationship is not established first. Let's take this offline for a bit. Your sales person talks to your customer, find out what their needs are, let them shop around a little, offer help, and then recommend a product. Your sales person doesn’t jump right in to sell a product without first finding out why the customer walked in, and for what reasons. Likewise, a relationship online is necessary before you start selling anything, or you’ll be very quickly labeled a spammer and you can’t afford that kind of negative response. So, take time to learn about your community, and then offer the product(s) that they need.

2. Failing to allocate resources

Sure, it’s not hard to set up a Facebook or Twitter account. That’s child’s play and anyone can do it, but maintaining it is another question altogether. Many businesses get started on social media but lack the capacity to sustain the effort because they don’t allocate resources to cater to that. Social media may be free, but it is not automated so you still have to put in man-hours. This means there is a cost to it, and businesses must be prepared by allocating staff to answer queries, keep conversations going, come up with new content and update regularly. Don’t be idealistic to think it’s an easy effort, and that your staff can do it over and above what they’re already doing. Social media can get labourious, require strategies and needs to be measured and evaluated like any other marketing effort, so behind a successful social media campaign is always a team devoted to those efforts.

3. Have no plan

So you got yourself on social media, then what? It’s pretty pointless if you haven’t a clue what you want out of it. It’s important to have a plan, focus on the pivotal, and work on it. Don’t get on every single social media platform and find yourself unable to keep up. Resist the urge and focus on those that will be a good fit for the end results you are hoping to achieve.

4. One size does not fit all

Facebook is not Twitter, as Wordpress is not Linkedin. Common sense, right? Strangely enough, there are businesses that apply the same strategy through every social media platform. Don’t limit your ability to succeed that way. Acknowledge that every social media site is different and require a different strategy of engagement, so you need to customise them accordingly to communicate effectively with the right audience.

5. Expecting too much

Social media is powerful tool and can do wonderful things for your business, but it has its limitations. You are not going to have your sales soar in a week, or your brand become premium like Coca-Cola or Starbucks. They don’t happen overnight so it’s important to have healthy expectations because unrealistic expectations isn't going to help your business, your team or yourself, and will only result in unnecess ary stress.

And there you have it, 5 blunders you can easily avoid making.

To find out what the next five social media mistakes commonly made are, check back next week for more.