049: Social Media Pitfalls Your Small Business Should Avoid

Title: Social Media Pitfalls Your Small Business Should Avoid

Guest: Emily Caddell

Emily: Not every platform needs to be used for your business.

Peter: Mhmm.

Emily: If you’re trying to create TikTok, Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, all of these things for your business, you’re gonna lose.

Peter: Welcome to the Biz and Life Done Well podcast, where we explore what it means and what it takes to do business and life well. I’m your host, Peter Wilson. If you’re like me, you’re intrigued by stories of common people who have achieved success in business and life. Join me as I interview fascinating people about how they got started, their successes and failures, their habits and routines, and what inspires them. Today, my guest is Emily Caddell.

She is our Director of Marketing and a Social Media Expert. Emily, what are we going to cover today?

Emily: Hi, Pete. So yeah, today we’re going to cover social media no nos that your small business should avoid.

Peter: Social media no nos, meaning things you shouldn’t do, but we’ve seen people do some of these.

Emily: Absolutely. And you absolutely should not do them. So let’s talk about them.

Peter: Got it. Great. Well, you’ve been doing social media with us for a number of years here. I remember when we first got started, we could barely navigate around Facebook and Facebook ads and Business Manager and all that. Things have come a long way

Emily: since then, haven’t they? Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, we’ve been doing it for about almost six years at this point. So we’ve learned a lot and

Peter: learned a lot about what to do and what not to do. So let’s dig right in. So what’s the first thing on your list of social media no nos for small business?

Emily: Sure. So the first one is treating your business page like your personal page. So first things first, your business should have their own social media pages. They should not have your name or the business owner’s name anywhere unless that’s part of your business name. They should be specialized just to the business, should have the business information on it.

And with that in regards, you should only treat it like a business page. So I think there’s opportunities for you to have fun on your social media page, for you to talk about the business in a positive, exciting way, but don’t get too personal. So this means stuff like not posting pictures of your kids, your pets, your personal life, unless it is directly related to your business.

Peter: Yeah, that’s great advice. And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen that rule broken by business owners who weren’t sure how to set up a business page. So they changed the name of their personal page to their business and then they just started posting business stuff and personal stuff. And it seems like it just can be kind of a nightmare, right? Just confusing, I guess, for both your friends and your potential clients.

Emily: Yep, confusing. And if someone’s following your business page, they might like you as a person, and they might wanna know what you’re doing business wise. But, again, sharing pictures of what your kids are doing, stuff like that, it’s just not an appropriate thing to be posting on social media. And it’s not why people follow your business page. It’s why they’re friends with you personally on Facebook, but.

Peter: Right, well, one of the things some businesses don’t know is that it’s relatively easy to separate the two. So for example, I have a Instagram account, personal Instagram account, and we have a business Instagram account. You know, I always, if I’m using my phone on a weekend, I’m gonna post on my personal page or my personal Instagram account. You handle a lot of the posting on our business account for Instagram, So for I don’t generally touch that, that much. So it’s not that hard.

It just takes a while. You just need an expert to maybe make sure you’ve got it set up correctly.

Emily: So And yeah, we’re happy to help people walk through that. It’s very easy and definitely worth it. Don’t, like you said, don’t just turn your personal page into your professional page. We can, of course, set up a new page, and that’s the way to go about that.

Peter: Right. So what is your second, what’s your second no no?

Emily: My second no no is buying followers. So it is very obvious when a business has bought followers because they’ll have a very large number of followers, like in the thousands, compared to the number of people who typically like their posts, like 10 people. So it’s very obvious when a business has bought followers and it really can hurt your business. It just really lacks authenticity, decreases the value of your business because people can see that they know that you’ve clearly bought followers. And that’s not what you want.

Those followers aren’t going to get you business anyways. So there’s no point in doing that. You need to really just work on growing it authentically and in an organic way.

Peter: So the so called algorithms that will maybe promote your content, I think the thinking was earlier, if you post something on Facebook, for example, and you’ve got a lot of followers, then Facebook would promote that content. But if nobody’s actually engaging with your content, they ignore the number of followers you have, right?

Emily: Oh, yeah, definitely. And yeah, they’re not going to show it to more people just because you have bought these followers. It’s really just going to show that you have more followers, but it’s going to be clear that those are not authentic, legitimate followers. Most of them are bots, honestly, when you buy followers.

Peter: Really? Okay. Got it. Yeah, I think that I’m hoping that that trend has passed, but, you know, we’ve been approached, it was a few years ago that we used to hear folks say that, you know, I have this opportunity to buy these followers or, or my competitor has half a million followers. What the heck?

Emily: Exactly. Exactly. So yeah, just don’t do that stray away.

Peter: Got it. Save your money. It looks like your third no no is avoid customer shaming, huge no no. Let’s talk about that. What are you referring to here?

Emily: So a couple things. The first one is that there’s, lately, there’s been a trend on Instagram Reels and TikTok where a business will show a video of them working while the audio is them reading frustrating emails or frustrating interactions that they’ve had with potential or current customers. Usually it’s ridiculous requests from the customer or a way that they’ve tried to scam the business. And we understand that sometimes customers or things like this can be very hard to deal with. It can be very frustrating for a business to deal with, but this trend is not one I would follow.

It’s harmful to your business. It makes people less likely to want to do business with you. It’s just not a good look. Because even if it is scammy customers or whatever, it’s not a good feeling that someone’s going to get from your business if they see that you’re that willing to openly shame a customer.

Peter: Other thing that it seems to me is if you created this kind of content on your social media and your employees see you doing that, you’re kind of opening up the door to any other, you know, sort of activities. I mean, I’m not saying that this is a direct correlation, but you know, doing that could just, it sets a bad precedent, I guess, for for the your, people that work for you, feeling like, oh, we can be snarky with unruly, well, not unruly, but even people who have a weird request, oh yeah, we’re gonna be snarky with them. Exactly. So

Emily: Yeah. So there’s there’s that customer shaming. Also just any kind of negative response to reviews. If you get a negative review on any platform, but specifically we’re talking about social. I mean, a negative customer shaming type of response will also make people weary to do business with you.

So keep your cool. There’s no need to ever have any kind of customer shaming on any of your social media platforms. Keep it positive. You can take care of these things offline with that customer.

Peter: Right. By the way, we’ve seen all these.

Emily: Oh, yeah. Definitely.

Peter: The next thing that you list out here, number four is, this is a little counterintuitive, social media no no, number four, having a presence on every social media platform. And so let’s talk about that. What’s up with that one?

Emily: Yeah, so not every platform needs to be used for your business. If you’re trying to create TikTok, Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, all of these things for your business, you’re gonna lose because you’re not gonna have time or energy or know all of these social media platforms well enough to put in the work that needs to be done well. So you’re just gonna be too spread thin.

Peter: Right.

Emily: So we really recommend evaluating what your business does and which platforms would be the most useful for those businesses. So we almost always suggest Facebook and Instagram.

Peter: Yeah.

Emily: If you’re a B2B business, you should also be on LinkedIn. And YouTube is one that could also be really helpful for your business depending on what type of business you do. But if you can be coming up with good video content for your business, Instagram could do really well for you. So just don’t get tempted to get into every single platform for your business focus on what’s relevant, focus on really getting into a couple of them and not just spreading yourself thin over every platform.

Peter: Got it. Yeah, the one that I avoid like the plague is Twitter.

Emily: Yes.

Peter: It just seems like it can turn into a quick cesspool. I mean, I know a lot of folks use Twitter for following the news and things like that. And if you have a really big brand, obviously, then you have to dedicate some folks to this full time. We’re talking about small businesses that don’t have dedicated resources inside the company to do this sort of thing. And if you’re not going to follow it or check it, then you’re better off not to get on that platform because it actually looks worse if you’re doing it.

One thing we do recommend in some cases just from an SEO value is to claim your listing in some of these other, if I’m a business, I would absolutely claim my LinkedIn profile. Just because there could be a time where potential employees, current employees, maybe posting things on LinkedIn, and they may want to highlight the fact that they work for your company. And then that would link that to that LinkedIn business profile page. So that makes sense. It doesn’t mean you necessarily have to be posting a lot.

Like if you’re a roofing company, don’t I think you’re gonna necessarily get a lot of roofing clients off of LinkedIn, for example, but you can at least maintain your presence on there, which is something that we do for businesses a lot of times, at least help them claim their profile, right?

Emily: Exactly. Yeah, that’s an important thing to do, especially on, yeah, like you said, LinkedIn, maybe even Twitter and stuff. But again, not every platform needs to be dedicated.

Peter: Right. Well, like Snapchat. I mean, I don’t think I’ve ever been on Snapchat.

Emily: No. Unnecessary, especially for a business. So yeah, really evaluate if you have any questions, we can talk about that of which ones would be helpful for your business. But again, just no need to have a presence on every platform.

Peter: It’s now time for number five. The number five, social media no no, which probably should be number one actually.

Emily: Yeah, definitely. So this is a big one, lacking authenticity. We really try to encourage every single one of our customers, whether we help them with their social media or not, to also have someone in house who can do regular posting on your social media pages. We can do some posting for you, like blog posts, other updates about your business maybe, but we aren’t in the office or in your company with you. So we don’t really know what’s happening day to day with your customers or your staff members.

So having someone who’s a part of that team, who can post regularly, who can help create some authenticity in your business is really important. And it can really help you focus on building relationships with your customers. And people just want to see that they can kind of tell when you’re outsourcing a lot of your posting or when you’re authentic, you’re in it all the time. You’re responding to customers, all of that really is important to people. So, we really just encourage you to find someone who is in your business who would be good at running your social media channels and have a conversation with them about doing it.

Peter: Well, the other thing that I think about is we can help you find somebody in your organization to do that. We can also work with that person when we’re planning out ad campaigns, for example, we can do that. So there’s a lot of ways we can help. But at the end of the day, you’ve got to have somebody in the organization that’s actually passionate about it, but also is, you know, somebody you trust. Because you’re trusting them with your brand and you want to make sure that whatever they do post is obviously appropriate.

You know, 99% of the time that’s not an issue, but you just don’t wanna find out the hard way. Exactly. You chose the wrong person to turn that over to in your organization. The other thing we recommend is that you actually pay them something extra to do this work.

Emily: Yeah. Yeah. Don’t just go to your receptionist and be like, here, this is yours now. Do it. Because they’re not going to have that same interest in it or that same value that you might want them to have unless they have some kind of reward for it or something.

And yeah, don’t just hand it over to whoever it needs to be an important conversation that you’re having with whoever you’re setting up to do this.

Peter: Right. A couple things that you’d want to look for would be an agreement on the amount of posting that they would do, you know, at the very least, you know, how often are they going to log in and check the DMs and check the, you know, the comments and respond to people that comment on the posts and things like that. We would recommend that you kind of write out a description, like a job description or, you know, at least some agreement so it’s very clear what your expectation is and you know what you’re going to get. That’s super helpful, Emily. So let’s, you want to run me through the list one more time, just top to bottom?

Emily: Yeah, absolutely. So number one, treating your business page like a personal page. Number two, buying followers. Number three, any kind of customer shaming. Number four, having a presence on every platform.

And number five, lacking authenticity.

Peter: So one thing that we’d like to offer listeners is an opportunity to spend an hour consulting with Emily, our social media expert. So we’ve created a special program for $99 You’ll get an hour of Emily’s time. She’ll be sharing information, you know, her, our best practices, but also a very personalized look at your business and your needs and helping you strategize on what you should be doing next. Maybe what’s missing, what you’re doing too much of, what you are not doing enough of, how to hire that person internally. So we’re offering that as a $99 special.

And we have a page set up, bizmarketing.com/social, and there’s a form there you can fill out. And then Emily will get in touch with you and arrange a time for you to have that conversation. Is there anything you want to add to that?

Emily: Yeah, just, I think this would be a great opportunity for your business to consider how you can grow social media organically. And I think I would prefer if you had someone in mind that you would want to be doing this social media who could be a part of the phone call. Think that would be really important. If you don’t, that’s okay. We can also talk through ideas of who could do it if you have those questions.

But if you’re ready to take that next step, I think it would be great to have the person who’s going to be doing it as well as either the business owner or that person’s manager, whoever is going to be kind of leading that would be great.

Peter: Sounds good. So last thing I would mention is that 99, it’s really a great deal. And if you decide to get any services from us, we would actually apply that to the setup fee for those services. There’s no obligation though, we’re not trying to pitch you on our services, we just wanna see you get the most out of social media in your business. Our goal is to help businesses win online, and this is another way that we can do that.

Emily: Absolutely.

Peter: Great. Well, Emily, thank you so much for joining me today, and I can’t wait to follow-up with some more social media topics with you very soon. Thanks.

Emily: Thank you.

Peter: Thanks for listening to this episode of Biz and Life Done Well with Peter Wilson. You can subscribe to us on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and most of the other popular podcast platforms. Please tell your friends about us and leave us a review so even more people will find out about us. Thanks again. We’ll see you soon.