Top Three Deadly Mistakes in Social Media for Wedding Businesses

The rules of social media are always changing.  If you are a wedding business, the wedding industry is constantly changing, too, which means keeping up with marketing your business takes double the effort if you want even minimal impact.  Engaging Inspiration stays up to date with the two crucial things that affect your business: 


1) Social Media Changes 
                  and
2) The Wedding Industry

By keeping up with these two things and, pardon the pun, "marrying them", we provide maximum impact for your business.  Social media is free and therefore a wonderful part of your marketing and advertising strategy.  But it  also can be a labyrinth of navigation and with the work involved in keeping up-to-date, one can get discouraged.  Yet, if your business doesn't stay current, it falls behind and so does your revenue. 

Here are the top three deadly mistakes in social media that I see most commonly from wedding businesses from caterers, wedding planners, florists, hotels, wedding venues and other wedding service providers:

1.  Telling and Not Engaging
 Specifically:

• Exclusively posting status updates (only) about what you are doing (just "telling" your followers).  Example: "We have a great wedding at the Clifton Estate today - it's going to be a great day!"  Or also, constantly(only)  posting compliments from clients about your services. In all cases, businesses who just "sell" their services constantly and exclusively by just "telling" are sabotaging themselves. Stop selling and start engaging.  While both of these types of updates have their place on social media, they need to be balanced with content that engages your fans and better yet: converts your fans/followers into sales. There is a very specific way to do this and it is a careful balance of knowing what to post, how to engage your audience and also when to post (the time of day).

 2.   Not Knowing How to Triple Your Audience For Your Post Without Paying to Boost It
 Every post you make (specifically on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram) has the potential to up to (and sometimes more than) triple your audience and call attention to your service and brand. 99% of wedding businesses do not do this or do not know how and are missing out on maximizing their "free" advertising on social media.


3.  Improper Use of the Hashtag (#)
While the hashtag is overused often in humor in personal social media or to emphasize certain feelings, it actually has a proper place in business social media for helping you draw attention to your brand and business.  But you must do your homework on the key terms being searched for and your hashtag must be completely relevant. I also often see businesses confusing "tagging" with hashtags and not knowing the difference is costing them dearly. 

To capitalize or not capitalize your hashtag phrases or parts of them?  This, and more tips on that ambiguous little hashtag in our next BLOG post.  Check back soon!

Engaging Inspiration is dedicated to training, marketing and social media for the wedding business and professional.