A lot of guys posing as internet marketing experts dish out a lot of advice, most of which, to give them the benefit of doubt, is based on real experience but most of which is speculation based on nothing concrete. Most of what is shared by even those who are truly social media experts can be misguided and inaccurate because nothing here is a Holy Writ engraved in stone. What passes as genuine authority is sometimes based merely on experience and general beliefs of the persons concerned.
So with tons of potentially misleading information about social media Dos and Don’ts circulating on the web, how can you differentiate the wheat from the chaff? Is there a way of debunking certain myths about “best practices” and laying down realistic social media marketing guidelines? The answer is “yes”, and here are some myths you are better off ignoring.
Myth# 1: That you must be on all the social networks. With the proliferation of social network platforms who has the time, money and energy to do this? Spreading yourself too thin by keeping an active presence everywhere will only sap your energy and get you nowhere. Target your audience where they are and concentrate on strategies that produce results.
Myth# 2: Focus only on Pinterest, Twitter or Facebook. Who said that any particular social media site is the holy grail of internet marketing? Of course it is good to focus somewhere, but you can do this only after you have tried different sites to determine where your target audience spends most of their online time.
Myth# 3: As long as you are on social media, you do not need email marketing campaigns. SMM does not make inbound marketing void, obsolete or extinct. It provides a different platform or channel for making email even stronger and more integrated. Anyway, for you to sign up for any social network you need your email, and have you realized that many people still hold email communication as next to nothing else?
Myth# 4: That social media has replaced SEO. As a trendy buzz word, it has done that, but in terms of strategy and function social media cannot replace SEO in any way. The right way to view this is to see the two as complimentary strategies that work together to produce better results. It is simply an additional platform so do not sleep on your SEO campaigns while you are dreaming social media
Myth# 5: The best way to deal with social media is to automate all your updates. If you think it takes most of your time then this may sound appealing until you wake up to the reality that social media is all about human talking to humans. Automating all you updates (well, you can automate some) will shout to your followers that you don’t care about real conversations. Where will that leave you?
These are just 5 of the hundreds of social media “best practice” crap that float around the internet. Stay tuned here because in our next article we are going to unearth more myths you must never pay attention to if you are intent on chasing the golden goose of Social Media Marketing!
Alisia Goodwin is a freelance blogger and currently writes for www.thinkbigonline.com/seo-services and it gives seo services in sydney.