Common social media marketing mistakes
Rajendra Zadpe
Social media is a blessing and a curse.
It’s easier than ever for people to directly connect with a brand and submit complaints. Social media also makes it easier than ever for brands to get widespread attention for a seemingly small mistake.
But we don’t want that to happen to you.
Here are five of the top social media marketing mistakes to avoid, what to do instead, and examples of brands who learned their lesson the hard way. By avoiding these mistakes, you can make social media work as a valuable tool for your brand to grow awareness, build a loyal fan base and most importantly, grow business.
- No content strategy
To implement a good social media strategy, you need a content strategy. These four factors can help you begin to develop a plan for content creation:
Who are you writing for? Knowing your audience will help you narrow down the kind of content to write. Content Marketing Institute shows a great example of how a paleo foods company did just that. Because they’re targeting an audience who is already knowledgeable about the diet, they scrapped ideas for paleo newbies.
What’s your story? Every blog and social media post is just one frame in your brand’s story arc. Consistency in both quality and voice establishes a firm identity, one that your audience will be glad to get to know (and hopefully love!). Creating a core strategy statement will help your content team maintain this consistency.
What’s your brand’s personality? Determine how you want to communicate with your audience by assigning a voice and tone to your brand—whether you want to be more like the class clown or the straight-A student. Whatever you decide, it should reflect who your brand is, and how you want your audience to perceive you.
Share useful stuff: Rather than spamming your audience with sales pitches and products, teach them something that they can use in their day-to-day life. From a listicle to a thought leadership piece to an interview, produce content that will benefit your reader. Don’t worry about going viral – in fact, that’s a pretty unrealistic goal. Focus on providing value to your audience.
- Not scheduling
Posting frequency requires a delicate balance.
You don’t want to post too often that your audience gets annoyed, but you also don’t want to post so infrequently that your brand is forgotten.
Use an editorial calendar to help you see the balance of content you post. This way, you can see if you’re posting too many times in one day on Facebook or if you haven’t yet scheduled any posts for the weekend.
So, WHEN should you post content? There are countless studies that show the best times to post, but only you know your unique collection of followers and when they’re most active. Keep track and report the time of your best engagements to know when to schedule your posts.
According to Social Media Examiner,”finding the perfect frequency is crucial because it could mean more engagement for your content or more unlikes and unfollows.” Use your analytics to determine the day of the week, and the time, that most engagement occurs.
However, before you schedule your tweets, make sure they’re completely finished. Otherwise, you’ll post something that looks like this.
- Posting the same thing across all channels
It may feel right for your brand to be everywhere. But investing in a strong strategy on just a few platforms will see better results, especially if you’re limited on time and resources.
Go where your intended audience is. If you’re a B2B company, the executives that you’re targeting probably aren’t sitting in their office taking selfies with a flower crown filter to send to clients.
So, what accounts should you be most active on?
Take a peek at where your competitors are. This can be a good indicator of where you should be, too. Check out their engagement levels on each platform. If one competitor posts every day to Facebook and only gets one or two “likes,” but receives multiple retweets and responses on Twitter, then you may want to start refining your Twitter game.
- Not engaging in conversation
Starting out, your brand might be that quiet kid hanging out by the punch bowl at the homecoming dance. And that’s OK.
But eventually, that kid learns that the dance is more fun when he begins to socialize…and dance.
A common approach when entering an uncomfortable social situation is to prepare a list of questions and talking points. Think of this as your social media marketing strategy.
In addition to planning when and on what platforms you’ll post your content, also be prepared to respond to users’ questions and address comments. You don’t want to miss out on the social part of social media!
- Prioritizing the number of followers
You may have heard companies who buy followers or even create fake accounts that will share and retweet a post.
Though the high number of followers helps a brand appear popular, why increase your number of followers if there is no genuine engagement?
When sending posts to the right audience — not the biggest audience — you will maximize the chances that you’ll get an actual interested human to visit your website. And the best-case scenario is that this visit turns into a conversion.
The right tools can streamline your social media practice so that you can spend more time creating content, sharing it with your audience and interacting with users.
Though we listed all the mistakes you can make on social, don’t be afraid to have fun with it and show off your brand’s best qualities.