Key Points
SOME FREQUENT SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING MISTAKES TO AVOID.
Overconfidence can make even the most experienced digital marketers make social media marketing mistakes that could have been avoided. In this article, Elistatus is here to teach you 14 ways to avoid social media mistakes.
1. DO NOT BELITTLE THE POWER OF SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
One of the most significant social media marketing mistakes a lot of businesses or digital marketers make is to belittle social media as a marketing strategy. Because there are billions of active users from around the world daily, it is safe to say social media is a powerful marketing tool.
If you genuinely intend to get your business maximum exposure and growth at a reasonable pace, then you have to include social media marketing as your primary marketing strategy.
2. DO NOT EXAGGERATE YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING PLAN
Another mistake which social media marketers fall for way too often is unnecessarily inflating their strategy to a point where it becomes unmanageable and unsustainable. When you are putting your social media strategy together for the first time, and even if you’ve been implementing it for a while, it’s impossible to establish a presence on all social media platforms.
There are dozens of social media sites out there, each with its requirements and best practices. Moreover, not all of them are ideal for marketing your type of product or service and for attracting your target customer persona. Thus, you should not spread your digital marketing work too thin. Instead, you should focus your efforts on a few – 4 to 5 – social media networks and excel at them.
3. LACK OF A SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING PLAN
The first rule of social media marketing is to create a plan and stick to it, so it is one of the most serious – and yet most common – social media marketing mistakes to not have a strategy. Posting random pictures and captions at random times on random platforms will not produce the best results. You need to have a clear, written plan of what you should post when and where. Following strict social media, the schedule is a must for succeeding in the business. This is the only way to assure that your marketing strategy is diverse and yet organized enough to reflect the interests of all your target users and present your business in the best possible way.
4. POSTING AT UNSTRATEGIC TIMES
The fourth social media marketing mistake to avoid at any cost is scheduling social media posts at random times. Posts are most likely to be seen by your followers as well as other users and to generate the most social media engagement around the time of publication.
People read and engage with posts on top of their newsfeed that’s a simple fact. If they have to scroll down on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, or any other social media website just to see your post, chances are that they will not do it.
That’s why it is crucial to schedule content for publication at the best time to post on each social media platform and for each of your audience segments. Scheduling content will increase social media engagement in addition to traffic to your website from this channel.
5. TREATING ALL SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS THE SAME
Another mistake is to treat all platforms in the same way. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Reddit, YouTube, and all other social media sites which you can use to market your business or product have strikingly different requirements and regulations.
For example, tweets should not exceed a 280-character limit, while you can schedule social media posts on Facebook of unlimited character and word count. Another example is Tumblr. While your Tumblr blogs can be as long as you want, short posts – known as microblogs – perform the best with the specific audience which this social media website attracts.
What this means is that you can’t create a single social media post to share on all channels and expect to attract thousands of new likes and followers. You have to take into consideration the best practices for each site and design customized content.
Of course, this is not to say that there’s absolutely no content that could work on multiple social media accounts on different platforms. For instance, you can quickly and successfully share links to your blog posts published on your business website on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Reddit, and even Instagram as long as you add a specific image.
6. MAKE USE OF ENOUGH VISUAL CONTENT
Despite all the differences between social media networks, there’s one thing that is common for all of the – visual content performs much better than written content. With the billions of new social media posts published every day, your content has to be visually appealing and attractive to get the attention of your existing followers and new target audiences.
Thus, one of the gravest social media marketing mistakes is not to use enough visuals. You should ensure that each of your posts has at least one photo, image, infographic, or video. This will maximize the number of new followers that you get as well as the social media engagement which you receive.
7. STOP BUYING LIKES AND FOLLOWERS
Speaking of maximizing engagement on your social media posts, keep in mind that all interactions on your account should be natural, native, and authentic. The malpractice of paying for likes, comments, and followers is gaining more and more popularity on various social media networks, which have taken severe measures to detect and punish such activities. Nevertheless, buying likes and followers remains a typical social media marketing mistake that has cost dearly even to experienced, professional digital marketers.
You should focus your money and effort on creating content that deserves likes rather than on paying for such actions and risking getting punished by a platform.
8. DON’T OVERPROMOTE YOUR BUSINESS OR PRODUCT.
Marketing is drastically different from blatantly selling whatever that is that you are trying to sell ultimately. Nonetheless, among the most common social media marketing mistakes is businesses forcibly pushing a sale on their social media followers.
However, the algorithms of most platforms have become smart enough to detect such attempts and limit their exposure. They can quickly become catchwords and language, which is trying to sell rather than the market.
Moreover, this is a suboptimal experience for your users as well. Most followers come to your social media accounts to read educational content.
They also come to learn more about your product and to ultimately consider if it’s worth buying. They are not ready to buy the first time they hear about your business.
So, make sure that you limit your free, organic social media efforts to marketing, not selling. Leave this for social media ads.
9. NOT ENGAGING MORE WITH EXISTING AND POTENTIAL CUSTOMERS
Another major social media marketing mistake is failing to understand and appreciate the fact that this is a two-way street. One of the significant purposes of social media marketing is building relations with both existing and future customers and potential business partners.
What this means to say is that you can’t just schedule social media posts on your accounts and expect to start selling like never before. You have to seek and actively build engagement and interaction with users and followers on your social media accounts.
In addition, make sure that you respond to comments and direct messages as soon as possible. Don’t forget to thank others who tag you in a post or mention you in a comment.
Social media websites are the ideal platforms for building positive, proactive relationships with different individuals and businesses in your field.
10. REFUSING TO UPDATE YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING PLAN
Remember how one of the most severe social media marketing mistakes is not to have a plan and instead do everything on an ad hoc basis? Well, another related mistake is to create a social media strategy and keep using it for years.
All aspects of the world of digital marketing are dynamically changing, sometimes daily. This means that you have to be continually doing research on recent trends in social media marketing and applying them to your plan.
Your social media marketing plan should remain a work in progress rather than a static blueprint.
Bonus
11. NOT TRACKING PERFORMANCE AT ALL
The chances are that your social media strategy will not work out correctly right away. Probably there will be social media posts that generate a lot of engagement on the platform and which drive a lot of traffic to your website, while there will be others which barely get noticed.
The reasons could be numerous, including the topics, the format, the time of publication, the hashtags, the tags, etc. To be able to analyze patterns and trends and identify the reasons for varying performance, start tracking your social media posts from day one. Make this part of your social media marketing routine.
12. TRACKING THE WRONG METRICS
It is critical to emphasize that you should not track performance just for the sake of monitoring. You should monitor how your posts do to evaluate if they contribute to achieving the strategic goals of your social media marketing plan.
Thus, you should not fall for one of the prevalent social media marketing mistakes like, tracking metrics that have little or no relevance to your goals.
Tracking the likes and comments on your social media posts is less important. Many times the most active users in terms of following, liking, and commenting are just looking for engagement rather than looking for a product to purchase.
13. STOP DEPENDING TOO MUCH ON AUTOMATION
As a social media marketer try to stop implementing too much automation in your social media processes. You should, indeed, be innovative and efficient in your social media marketing efforts to remain competitive in 2020. However, you can’t just put your strategy on autopilot and hope for the best.
Human touch is still a crucially important element for the success of a social media strategy. You have to customize each of your social media posts to ensure maximum engagement and top performance.
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