Kristi Hines: Advice on how to Fix Six Common Social Media Gaffes

We’re all still feeling our way along with trying to figure out how to make social media work for our businesses. So any help at all is welcome, especially from internet marketing specialists like Kristi Hines. In an article for SocialMediaExaminer.com, she lists the “Top 6 Social Media Mistakes and How to Fix Them.” Briefly, they are:
1. Having the wrong connections: Is your social message reaching your target market? Quantity is not always as good as quality when it comes to communicating with your friends, followers or fellow tweeters. Hines advises looking for relevant connections in your industry, and provides a variety of ways to find those people using social directories and groups.
2. Hiding your social media presence: The only way people are going to know you’re out there is if you tell them. This includes adding links to your social sites on your home web site, mentioning them in your signature on e-mails, printing them on your business cards and including them in your signature on forums where you have a profile.
3. Sending the wrong message: Keep business and personal social presences separated. Hines says it’s one thing to be researching your credentials to find your last 20 Tweets were trivial nonsense, and quite another to find 20 business-related factors.
4. Using social media for link building: If the only reason you’re creating a social media profile is to hopefully gat a backlink to your website, then you’re not really using social media correctly. IN order to get links that will work for you through social media, you have to be “social.” Participate on relevant sites and let the links come to you.
5. Worrying about ROI: There’s no real proof one way or the other yet that Social Media does anything to improve your ROI. One thing for sure is that most of the benefits of social media are not really measurable from a profit standpoint. You can use it to increase your visibility, which in turn attracts more people to your business, which may result in more sales, but there are too many other factors to consider in order to say that social media clinched the sale.
6. Following too many “rules.” Everybody’s an expert. You’ve probably read a few who have what they feel are the unbreakable rules of social media. But the fact is, what works in one business may not work at all in another. Social Media is constantly evolving. Hines recommends following people in your business who have successfully sued social media to accomplish something.