The world of digital marketing is exploding,businesses are realizing the importance of digital marketing strategies. With this explosion comes the myths and bad habits . These bad habits could be hurting your business!

These are some of the most common social media myths, debunked.

Social media marketing is free

Myth: The myth with social media marketing is that it’s FREE! You join Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social media platforms, but once you sign up it’s not free. This is the only free part of the gig.

Debunked: Whether you hire a qualified digital marketing agency Austin or have someone internal, it’s going to cost you money. If you want the best images, promotions, research and more: you’ll need to utilize some money in your marketing budget.

These funds will be spent on proper research for your brand, target audience, the best platforms for your business to be on and the latest updates and changes to each social networks algorithms.

Sell, sell and sell some more

Myth: This is one of the most common misconceptions that happens with social media marketing. Many business executives think that social media is a megaphone and everyone is listening to you; in fact, the opposite is true.

Debunked: Sprout Social surveyed over 1,000 Facebook, Twitter and Instagram users to determine what annoys them about social media marketing for businesses. Want to take a guess what their top problem was? Too many promotions! Over 57 percent of followers unfollowed a business who was posting too many promotions. As a leading digital marketing agency Austin, we follow a 80/20 rule in digital marketing! This is the perfect mix between promotion and industry news.

Join ALL the social media applications

Myth: Often times, there is an assumption that joining every social media application will increase website traffic and revenue. When this happens, you could be speaking to yourself on that platform. Where is your audience? There are over 60 different social media platforms a business could be utilizing!

Debunked: At OMG Austin, we follow a different strategy. A major step in figuring out which social media platforms your business should be on, is market research and target audience research. If your audience is primarily on Instagram, why are you putting all of your focus on  Facebook?

Just post the same thing on all platforms

Myth: It’s simple. You craft and create one message for all platforms! There isn’t a demand to switch it up for different platforms.

Debunked: Yes, you can create and craft the same message for all your platforms, but there is a strategy. A business can use that same message but tailor the message in specific ways to reach a larger audience on their platforms.

As a rule, you can make longer posts on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. On the other hand, Twitter should be about 100 characters with no more than three hashtags. Take the same message and craft it for all of your different platforms. Change the hashtags, make it fun and exciting on Instagram and creative for Twitter.

Social media doesn’t provide an ROI

Myth: A common theme in meetings is, “social media marketing doesn’t generate enough ROI for it to be worth it.” All of our clients care about their growth, new followers and other digital marketing growth, but they want money and numbers to be increasing too.

Debunked: The main issue with ROI and social media is that digital marketing and social media platforms are constantly changing. A new Facebook update can drop engagement, website traffic and change their ranking. At the end of the day, social media marketing increases brand awareness, sets you above the competition, improve business relationships with customers and clients and more.

#Hashtags

Myth: #There #is #a #common #misconception #that #the #more #hashtags #the #better. The most hashtags you use the more people you will reach. This is the mindset when someone is posting 10 hashtags on their Twitter post.

Debunked: #Stopthehashtagabuse. A study from Socialbakers shows that the more hashtags on Facebook decreases engagement and won’t help you get more engagement. Posts with one to two hashtags on Facebook got the best engagement for that post. Any more than that decreases the engagement by over 60 to 100 interactions.

At a certain point, too many hashtags become spammy and are not helpful. You want to strategically posts the right amount of hashtags on your tweet, instagram post, Facebook and more.

Social media marketing is a strategy. The right hashtags, the research, the marketing strategies and more all affect your businesses social media marketing.