Avoid these four social media mistakes

For most of your clients, social media will be their first impression of you. To create a strong impression, avoid these common mistakes:

1. Not having a strategy

Don’t just create a social media page and forget about it. Formulate a strategy to manage your content. The first step is to find the social media sites your clients are on. The second step is to publish regular content on all these sites. The content should be relevant to your clients, and your business.

For example, if you’re an accountant, you could publish posts about:

Managing a small business’s bookkeeping functions
Understanding components of a profit and loss, like abnormal items
An explanation of key performance indicators
The different balance sheet categories

If you don’t have time to publish daily, consider these options:

You can outsource writing social media posts to a content writing agency that specialises in property and finance, like Hunter & Scribe.
You can partner with other companies to share the same social media posts. For example, an accountant could write a series of short articles on what a lender looks for on a balance sheet and share it with mortgage brokers and lenders. They, in turn, could write about budgets and share those with the accountant.
Write the posts in a batch and use software like Buffer or Birdeye to automatically publish them.

2. Not looking at your metrics

Don’t forget to look at your metrics. The number of views, reactions, comments and shares will show you which posts are popular. If the posts that are popular and not directly relevant to your business, you may need to tweak your profile, settings or content to attract the right audience: existing and potential clients. If you’re just starting out and getting no views (and consequently no meaningful metrics), don’t worry, that’s normal – there are millions of businesses vying for attention. Getting an active audience takes time, but there are a few things you can do to speed this up:

Promote your social media pages in your newsletters
Encourage your clients to follow you on social media by giving them incentives like tips, motivational quotes or an opportunity to ask questions
Use paid advertising to get more followers

3. Engage with unhappy clients

If your clients are unhappy with your service, it’s often a good idea to accept responsibility, even if your business isn’t at fault.

For example, if a client pays a credit repair agency to fix their credit, they will expect to have a higher credit score afterwards. But if there are no mistakes on the client’s credit report, the credit repair agency may be unable to help. If the credit repair agency does not explain the situation to the unhappy client, they may leave a negative review. So it might be better for the credit repair agency to apologise and offer a solution. For example: “We’re sorry we couldn’t repair your credit and we know how disappointed you are. Our consultants are willing to suggest ways to improve your credit score over time. “We would also like to offer you a complimentary copy of our ebook, ‘How to improve your credit score’. “Could we perhaps touch base in six months’ time and see if there’s more that can be done?” Of course, there’s no guarantee this strategy will work, but if you succeed, you might gain a loyal client who’ll tell others of their experience.

3. Not focusing on your target audience

Always keep your target audience in mind when you publish information. Your target audience consists of your existing and potential clients, which might not be your friends and family.

So create a business social media page that is separate from your personal social media page. And publish content relevant to your business or industry on your business page. For example, a mortgage broker could write posts about:

Home loan rates and fees
Why borrowers need to shop around
Property market news
How to qualify for lower home loan rates

Although the mortgage broker could publish personal information, like pictures of their pets, it should be in context, such as on Take Your Dog to Work Day.

4. Not engaging with your followers

The point of social media is for people to interact with each other. While publishing helpful tips and information is useful, you also need to engage with your clients. So answer their questions, reply to comments and share their posts. The more comments there are, the more likely people will add an opinion. You could even comment on your own posts to show your audience you’re there and will read the comments.

If you need help writing social media posts, talk to Hunter & Scribe. We can source the information, write the posts and schedule them for you. You can hire us to write a series of evergreen posts you keep reusing, or fresh content which includes the latest news in the property or finance industries.

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