- Don't have unrealistic expectations and don't be over salesy. Going viral is a million to one chance
- Don't forget to balance time spent interacting against sales gained and don't rule out advertising – it might give a better ROI
- Don't ignore what your customers say, bad or good
It's easy to get things wrong when embracing the likes of Twitter and Facebook to promote your business. Chris Barling advises on what not to do when using social media for marketing.
With a marketing hat on I look at the latest social networking usage figures and find it hard not to salivate. Facebook has more than 400m active users, and more than 500bn minutes per month are spent by users online. Reinforcing the impression, Twitter has over 100m users, growing by 300,000 per day. On average there are 55m tweets per day. YouTube is the same, both growing and retaining users at an impressive rate. The figures are truly extraordinary.
Social networks succeed for a simple reason; the principle that binds them together is based on conversation and interaction. While this may sound great for us personally, for marketers it’s a major problem.
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