Social media is such a useful marketing platform and needs to be used in the most effective manner possible. However, as so many companies are all queueing up to try to have a major impact on social media, it is important that you avoid common mistakes that are made time and time again. This will help you to craft campaigns that have a genuine positive impact, as well as ensure that you are reaching as many people as possible. So, here are just a few social media marketing mistakes to sidestep.
Failing to think through your strategy
Before you go any further, you need to have a strategy in place. This will help you to have a path that you can follow and a blueprint that works well. Usually, this will be created by your digital marketing team. Alternatively, you can look to external agencies to help you out with social media digital marketing. No matter what you do, it needs to be carefully thought through and have metrics and targets that you are looking to hit. If you have already come up with strategies in the past, you should then be able to tweak them over time. Also, you should start to know what your audience are responding to and will be able to make improvements accordingly.
Posting without purpose
One of the common mistakes that people make in social media posting is that they put too much up. This is down to the fact that they are trying to combat the error of posting too little, but they are going too far in the other direction. If you don’t have a clear purpose in mind for what you are putting up, it is more than likely that you are going to cause people to unsubscribe as they get sick of your posts. What you are putting up should all come as part of the plan that has already been talked about in the section just above this one.
Not engaging in conversations with followers
The whole point of social media is that it is a two-way street. If you just put up posts without responding to anything that you are getting back again, you are just shouting into the void and are making no attempt to engage in conversation. This does not mean that you have to respond to every single post that you get, but if there is an interesting talking point, it is worth continuing the conversation rather than stopping it dead. At the same time, if people are making complaints, you may well need to address them properly. Again, you need to have a proper policy for how you deal with them, as you don’t want to rush in without a second thought.
Failing to vary up your content
If you just keep on posting the same things over and over again, you make it much less likely that you will engage your followers as you are not bringing any sense of variety. As well as written posts, you also need to think about video and imagery, as well as competitions, polls, and everything else that social media has the ability to bring. Again, this should all come back to your plan and ensure that what you are putting out has enough variety to engage followers and keep them coming back for more time and time again.
Too many promotional posts
While it is important that you are trying to get your brand message out there and you are engaging followers, if you only talk about yourself in an overly promotional way time and time again, you make it much more likely that people are going to unsubscribe as they are simply no longer interested and engaged with what you are putting out there.
With this in mind, you can try to include a little bit more subtlety with your posts rather than simply stating how great you are all the time. When you look at the most celebrated accounts on social media, you find the ones that are engaging followers in a creative manner, often through the use of humor. As a direct result of this action, their brand is getting noticed, but they are not causing people to switch off in a way that they may do otherwise.
Failing to track or use analytics software
You also need to have a clear idea of how well your posts are doing, and you can’t necessarily get this just from the number of likes or responses that you are getting. Instead, you need to track your posts using proper software, as this will help you to see the number of people who are seeing them in the first place, which posts have been particularly popular, etc. This way, you should then be able to adapt and tailor your strategy to ensure that you are gradually starting to do better over time.
Assuming all social media platforms run the same way
Each and every social media platform is different and needs to be treated as such. You cannot expect that you can post exactly the same way across all of them, and you are going to get similar results. For example, when you are posting on a highly visual platform such as Instagram, this is going to end up having a particularly different impact compared to using one that is much more text-based, such as X/Twitter. As part of your strategy, you should be able to work out the subtleties of each and make adjustments based on this.
Social media marketing can be one of the most effective tools in your arsenal as long as it is used in the correct manner. These are just a few of the ways that you can get it right by avoiding the common issues that crop up time and time again. Ultimately, they should all help to inform a strategy that works well, attracts a bigger following of people, and ensures that you are getting a great deal of attention.
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