14 Mistakes to Avoid While Doing Social Media Marketing
14 Mistakes to Avoid While Doing Social Media Marketing
Uma Bhat
Fri, 07/27/2018 - 10:49
Social media marketing is evolving as one of the main marketing strategies for brands since there is a large crowd that you can attract on social media.
As per social media statistics, 7 out of 10 consumers expect a business to have a well-maintained social media presence.
Even though there is so much importance attached to social media marketing, there is still a gap in understanding the social media marketing strategy. Most of the times brands do mistakes that will hurt their social media marketing.
To make it easy, we have listed down 14 mistakes that every social media marketer should avoid while doing social media marketing.
1. Not Understanding Your Target Audience
This can be a disaster for a social media marketer since the whole purpose of social media marketing may be defeated if you are not able to understand your audience.
But finding the relevant audience for your brand might be a big challenge when there are hundreds and millions of people out there.
When your goal of social media marketing is to build high value content that can generate interest for your audience, then knowing the pulse of your audience is the first and most important thing that you should care about.
Before you go any forward to find the right audience, answer some questions such as who is the user of your product? Which age group is more likely to use your product? Who are they following on social media? Who is their hero on social media? When are they most active on social media?
With the answers to these questions, you are approaching nearer to your target audience. But doing it all manually might be a long journey. There are many social media tools such as Cloohawk, Audiense, AgoraPulse and QuickSprout that help to identify your target audience. These tools can be used to conduct research on various factors thereby coming up with a customer persona.
Related Content: 5 Tools To Decode Your Target Audience
2. Not Interacting With Your Audience
One of the most haunting things for a social media manager is when there is no interaction and engagement with the social media audience. Not having enough interaction with your audience can lead to a dead end you’re your social media marketing.
Engagement with audience should be on the top of the list of all the tasks that a social media manager performs.
Interact with customers on social media to understand your customers, their likes and dislikes, their preferences, the reason why they are following your brand, which other competitor brands are they following, and so on.
A social media manger should be on the toes always in lookout for the product reviews and feedback that can be posted by the audience in the form of tweets and comments. You should interact with them by responding to the queries and concerns of the social media audience to improve and serve your customers better. The interaction leads to building loyal customers in the long run. All this added together gives you more customer base and higher sales.
3. Not Dealing Effectively with Negative Social Media Feedback
When you get to see complaints or issues relating to your product on social media, how do you react to the same? Either you can ignore it or you can delete the comments on social media.
Customers and audience is writing their opinion and feedback just because they want their voice to be heard. But imagine if you are ignoring it by deleting it or by not responding to it. It can be a disaster.
An angry customer won't speak directly to you. Make sure that you don't miss important feedback on social media by continuously tracking your brand mentions and names, hashtags and URLs.
Negative feedback can fire up and multiply. In many cases it can lead to the news becoming viral on social media, when the feedback is not handled quickly.
Brands should take control of the negative feedback by quickly responding on social media in a genuine manner without being too defensive.
Your response should leave the customer feeling listened to. When required do not hesitate to apologize for the mistake or inconvenience caused. This can be an effective way to diffuse a negative feedback.
4. Not Creating a Social Media Marketing Strategy
Social strategy is all about setting up the core values for your social media marketing, crafting a vision statement, setting goals and deadlines, and building a brand image.
Social media marketing strategy is not just coming up with plans to create and publish content. It is more about engaging your audience. Understand the issues and problems faced by the audience and offer information and solution without promoting too much about your products.
Your social media strategy will help you to understand key performance indicators such as the social media presence, social media engagement, reach, influence and return on investment. Once the key indicators are defined it is important to track your social media strategy to measure the effectiveness.
Related Content: 6 Key Ingredients for a Successful Social Media Marketing Strategy
5. Posting Too Much Self Promotion Content
There is always a doubt when we say ‘too much’ How do we know when it becomes too much?
More than 86% of people follow atleast one brand on social media, but they are not looking for promotion content.
People start following a brand since they like to get informative and educational updates from your company. But if you focus heavily on self-promotion content, the users are likely to get annoyed and unfollow you.
Of course for your brand, it could be very important product updates or new version release news, but touting daily your latest product or your latest release is not really going down well with the social media audience.
In this situation where you are not sure of how much content should be promotional, then apply the Pareto’s 80:20 rule while posting social media content. According to the rule, only 20% of your posts should talk about your brand and products and the rest 80% should offer value-added content like how-to-do videos, tips and tricks, industry news, resources and events.
Don’t allow excessive self-promotions kill your social media marketing efforts.
6. Not Having Enough Followers
A social media marketer, who does not have any goal to increase the followers on social media, will definitely not be able to achieve the goal of social media marketing. For many social media marketers, increasing their follower count is a continuous battle that they have to fight every single day.
Every marketer starts with an aim to increase followers on social media. Without having a good amount of followers for your account, you will fail at pushing your brand forward.
According to social media studies “Increase in followers remains a top priority for most of the brands”
Higher number of followers gives you larger reach since your content is seen by higher number of people. Just remember that on social media space, the connections are like a spider web. Someone is connected to someone else and even if they are not your direct followers they might get interested in your brand after seeing it on their friend’s timeline.
Related Content: 6 Proven Tactics to Increase Social Media Followers
7. No Consistency In Content Posting
Sharing quality content with your audience across social channels is most important for engaging with existing audience and to attract new audience. But if the content sharing is erratic without any schedule and consistency, if will become a major hurdle in meeting your social media marketing goals.
Having content but not having a consistent plan for scheduling and publishing the content can be a disaster. Plan a social content calendar in advance for a month so that you don’t fall short of content.
But tracking the content and scheduling it publishing it manually can be a huge task and can get slipped while juggling between different tasks. Hence the use of social media management tools such as Cloohawk can be used to create and curate content, increase audience engagement, schedule your posts, competitor analysis, social media analytics and much more. These tools help you to manage and optimize your social media content.
8. Not Having Diversified Content
When a person is offered the same content time and again, it can be extremely boring and might lead to losing a follower on social media. Posting monotonous content without any social media strategy or plan can probably lead you to zero engagement from followers.
Time and again it’s been proven that your social media audience is craving for unique, informative, thoughtful and actionable content.
Review different types of content categories such as blog, articles, images, infographics, links, and videos. You can also include interviews, testimonials, ebooks, How-to-Videos and much more. If you’re not taking out enough time to plan your content and diversify your social media calendar in advance, chances are that you will end up sharing the same old content without offering diversity.
Surprise and offer your social media users with different variety of content instead of serving them with the same content over and over again.
Related Content: 7 Types Of Social Media Content to Drive Engagement
9. Not Having Any Social Media Analytics
How many social media managers exactly know how a piece of content is performing on social media? Do you know if your audience likes images or videos? Do you know how many of your posts have been retweeted?
Not many social media managers have answer for these questions.
With millions of posts on social media, it can be a nightmare if you are not checking the performance of your post and more so not comparing it with your competitor posts.
Social media analytics or social media metrics is becoming popular and a requisite for all social media managers.
Brands should use the social media analytics extensively to understand each action on social media such as likes, comments, tweets, retweets and of course to measure big social media campaigns. Tools such as Sproutsocial, Buffer, Brand24, Brandwatch and Cyfe can be used to monitor social media analytics across multiple platforms.
Sharing on social media content without analytics is essentially useless since the content that you are sharing might not be the best engagement content and may not be a valuable insight. Analytics is important to see things in context.
Related Conent: Top 5 Social Media Analytics Tools For Social Media Managers
10. Stretching Yourself Too Thin
While it is a good idea to have presence on multiple social media platforms, it can be a terrible mistake if you stretch yourself too thin. Many brands get so hyper with the social media that they sign up for many different social media accounts which are not even relevant to their brand. But this can do more damage than good.
Brands have pressure to be on multiple social media platforms. But it is not a simple task and in reality there is a lot of effort required.
You have to understand the need to signing up a particular social media network. For example if your products cater to a large section of the female population, then pinterest might be a good choice since there are a high number female population on Pinterest.
Focus on your target audience and match it with the demographics of the social media.
11. Not Having Profiles On Multiple Social Media Platforms
With social media marketing, there are so many different outlets available for your business that you can take advantage of. Never limit yourself to just one or two social media platforms.
Create your business pages on different and popular networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Google+.
Figure out the best platforms for your brand. You can decide this based on the kind of products and services that you offer the kind of population you serve, the location that you are targeting, and a lot of other features that will improve your social media marketing.
But imagine if you have to manage multiple platforms manually by logging in and finding content to share and engage with audience. Its next to impossible. Hence there are a lot of social media management tools such as Cloohawk, Buffer, Hootsuite, SumAll, Nuzzell and Buzzsumo which will assist you to handle multiple platforms.
12. Not Having Enough Visibility On Social Media
If you don’t have a social media strategy that makes your brand more visible on social media then you are missing a great opportunity to be seen to millions of people who are on social media.
Brands are resorting to social media marketing to reach a global audience, to increase brand awareness, to acquire customers, to build market and to promote new markets.
Your social media profiles should be clearly visible on your company websites, email signatures, blogs, contact us, and any other place that is highly accessed by social media users.
Cross promote your social media profiles on different social media platforms. Conduct contests and quizzes, give away coupons and prizes, take part in relevant forums, participate in community chats and make yourself visible in various social media platforms. This will drastically improve your visibility on social media.
13. Not Having An Efficient Social Media Team
If you are thinking that you can do social media marketing without having a proper team, then it’s one of the big mistakes that you are doing. So how important is it to have a team dedicated to social media marketing?
A social media company has to consider various factors to make a good impression on social media platforms. When your organization is big or is involved heavily in social media marketing, then it can become difficult for a single person to handle your social media activities. Hence its most important for brands to have a dedicated social media team to manage this task. Having a team of people who are social media experts will ensure that the workload is distributed and ensures there's always someone who is available to address customer queries or mentions on social media.
It takes a team of social media professionals to continuously watch out for opportunities and offer real-time customer service which can take your brand to the next level.
14. Not Following Social Media Policy
A company should have a strong social media policy with details on how the employees and all other related parties should behave online. They should have clear laid out policies on how to write and comment online when they are representing the company.
Good social media policy can save the company’s reputation and will make sure that their internal corporate matter is not being exposed in public on social media pages.
A social media policy should be able to control what employees are saying about the company, to safeguard information, not to disclose the customer details, and also how to react to the negative comments about the company.
Conclusion
When a brand is attempting to perform social media marketing, there may be many hurdles and mistakes that will not allow you to reach your potential. Knowing the mistakes and correcting them will be the only way to move forward. Steer clear of the mistakes mentioned here and have a better chance of enjoying successful social media marketing.
Uma Bhat
Fri, 07/27/2018 - 10:49
Social media marketing is evolving as one of the main marketing strategies for brands since there is a large crowd that you can attract on social media.
As per social media statistics, 7 out of 10 consumers expect a business to have a well-maintained social media presence.
Even though there is so much importance attached to social media marketing, there is still a gap in understanding the social media marketing strategy. Most of the times brands do mistakes that will hurt their social media marketing.
To make it easy, we have listed down 14 mistakes that every social media marketer should avoid while doing social media marketing.
1. Not Understanding Your Target Audience
This can be a disaster for a social media marketer since the whole purpose of social media marketing may be defeated if you are not able to understand your audience.
But finding the relevant audience for your brand might be a big challenge when there are hundreds and millions of people out there.
When your goal of social media marketing is to build high value content that can generate interest for your audience, then knowing the pulse of your audience is the first and most important thing that you should care about.
Before you go any forward to find the right audience, answer some questions such as who is the user of your product? Which age group is more likely to use your product? Who are they following on social media? Who is their hero on social media? When are they most active on social media?
With the answers to these questions, you are approaching nearer to your target audience. But doing it all manually might be a long journey. There are many social media tools such as Cloohawk, Audiense, AgoraPulse and QuickSprout that help to identify your target audience. These tools can be used to conduct research on various factors thereby coming up with a customer persona.
Related Content: 5 Tools To Decode Your Target Audience
2. Not Interacting With Your Audience
One of the most haunting things for a social media manager is when there is no interaction and engagement with the social media audience. Not having enough interaction with your audience can lead to a dead end you’re your social media marketing.
Engagement with audience should be on the top of the list of all the tasks that a social media manager performs.
Interact with customers on social media to understand your customers, their likes and dislikes, their preferences, the reason why they are following your brand, which other competitor brands are they following, and so on.
A social media manger should be on the toes always in lookout for the product reviews and feedback that can be posted by the audience in the form of tweets and comments. You should interact with them by responding to the queries and concerns of the social media audience to improve and serve your customers better. The interaction leads to building loyal customers in the long run. All this added together gives you more customer base and higher sales.
3. Not Dealing Effectively with Negative Social Media Feedback
When you get to see complaints or issues relating to your product on social media, how do you react to the same? Either you can ignore it or you can delete the comments on social media.
Customers and audience is writing their opinion and feedback just because they want their voice to be heard. But imagine if you are ignoring it by deleting it or by not responding to it. It can be a disaster.
An angry customer won't speak directly to you. Make sure that you don't miss important feedback on social media by continuously tracking your brand mentions and names, hashtags and URLs.
Negative feedback can fire up and multiply. In many cases it can lead to the news becoming viral on social media, when the feedback is not handled quickly.
Brands should take control of the negative feedback by quickly responding on social media in a genuine manner without being too defensive.
Your response should leave the customer feeling listened to. When required do not hesitate to apologize for the mistake or inconvenience caused. This can be an effective way to diffuse a negative feedback.
4. Not Creating a Social Media Marketing Strategy
Social strategy is all about setting up the core values for your social media marketing, crafting a vision statement, setting goals and deadlines, and building a brand image.
Social media marketing strategy is not just coming up with plans to create and publish content. It is more about engaging your audience. Understand the issues and problems faced by the audience and offer information and solution without promoting too much about your products.
Your social media strategy will help you to understand key performance indicators such as the social media presence, social media engagement, reach, influence and return on investment. Once the key indicators are defined it is important to track your social media strategy to measure the effectiveness.
Related Content: 6 Key Ingredients for a Successful Social Media Marketing Strategy
5. Posting Too Much Self Promotion Content
There is always a doubt when we say ‘too much’ How do we know when it becomes too much?
More than 86% of people follow atleast one brand on social media, but they are not looking for promotion content.
People start following a brand since they like to get informative and educational updates from your company. But if you focus heavily on self-promotion content, the users are likely to get annoyed and unfollow you.
Of course for your brand, it could be very important product updates or new version release news, but touting daily your latest product or your latest release is not really going down well with the social media audience.
In this situation where you are not sure of how much content should be promotional, then apply the Pareto’s 80:20 rule while posting social media content. According to the rule, only 20% of your posts should talk about your brand and products and the rest 80% should offer value-added content like how-to-do videos, tips and tricks, industry news, resources and events.
Don’t allow excessive self-promotions kill your social media marketing efforts.
6. Not Having Enough Followers
A social media marketer, who does not have any goal to increase the followers on social media, will definitely not be able to achieve the goal of social media marketing. For many social media marketers, increasing their follower count is a continuous battle that they have to fight every single day.
Every marketer starts with an aim to increase followers on social media. Without having a good amount of followers for your account, you will fail at pushing your brand forward.
According to social media studies “Increase in followers remains a top priority for most of the brands”
Higher number of followers gives you larger reach since your content is seen by higher number of people. Just remember that on social media space, the connections are like a spider web. Someone is connected to someone else and even if they are not your direct followers they might get interested in your brand after seeing it on their friend’s timeline.
Related Content: 6 Proven Tactics to Increase Social Media Followers
7. No Consistency In Content Posting
Sharing quality content with your audience across social channels is most important for engaging with existing audience and to attract new audience. But if the content sharing is erratic without any schedule and consistency, if will become a major hurdle in meeting your social media marketing goals.
Having content but not having a consistent plan for scheduling and publishing the content can be a disaster. Plan a social content calendar in advance for a month so that you don’t fall short of content.
But tracking the content and scheduling it publishing it manually can be a huge task and can get slipped while juggling between different tasks. Hence the use of social media management tools such as Cloohawk can be used to create and curate content, increase audience engagement, schedule your posts, competitor analysis, social media analytics and much more. These tools help you to manage and optimize your social media content.
8. Not Having Diversified Content
When a person is offered the same content time and again, it can be extremely boring and might lead to losing a follower on social media. Posting monotonous content without any social media strategy or plan can probably lead you to zero engagement from followers.
Time and again it’s been proven that your social media audience is craving for unique, informative, thoughtful and actionable content.
Review different types of content categories such as blog, articles, images, infographics, links, and videos. You can also include interviews, testimonials, ebooks, How-to-Videos and much more. If you’re not taking out enough time to plan your content and diversify your social media calendar in advance, chances are that you will end up sharing the same old content without offering diversity.
Surprise and offer your social media users with different variety of content instead of serving them with the same content over and over again.
Related Content: 7 Types Of Social Media Content to Drive Engagement
9. Not Having Any Social Media Analytics
How many social media managers exactly know how a piece of content is performing on social media? Do you know if your audience likes images or videos? Do you know how many of your posts have been retweeted?
Not many social media managers have answer for these questions.
With millions of posts on social media, it can be a nightmare if you are not checking the performance of your post and more so not comparing it with your competitor posts.
Social media analytics or social media metrics is becoming popular and a requisite for all social media managers.
Brands should use the social media analytics extensively to understand each action on social media such as likes, comments, tweets, retweets and of course to measure big social media campaigns. Tools such as Sproutsocial, Buffer, Brand24, Brandwatch and Cyfe can be used to monitor social media analytics across multiple platforms.
Sharing on social media content without analytics is essentially useless since the content that you are sharing might not be the best engagement content and may not be a valuable insight. Analytics is important to see things in context.
Related Conent: Top 5 Social Media Analytics Tools For Social Media Managers
10. Stretching Yourself Too Thin
While it is a good idea to have presence on multiple social media platforms, it can be a terrible mistake if you stretch yourself too thin. Many brands get so hyper with the social media that they sign up for many different social media accounts which are not even relevant to their brand. But this can do more damage than good.
Brands have pressure to be on multiple social media platforms. But it is not a simple task and in reality there is a lot of effort required.
You have to understand the need to signing up a particular social media network. For example if your products cater to a large section of the female population, then pinterest might be a good choice since there are a high number female population on Pinterest.
Focus on your target audience and match it with the demographics of the social media.
11. Not Having Profiles On Multiple Social Media Platforms
With social media marketing, there are so many different outlets available for your business that you can take advantage of. Never limit yourself to just one or two social media platforms.
Create your business pages on different and popular networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Google+.
Figure out the best platforms for your brand. You can decide this based on the kind of products and services that you offer the kind of population you serve, the location that you are targeting, and a lot of other features that will improve your social media marketing.
But imagine if you have to manage multiple platforms manually by logging in and finding content to share and engage with audience. Its next to impossible. Hence there are a lot of social media management tools such as Cloohawk, Buffer, Hootsuite, SumAll, Nuzzell and Buzzsumo which will assist you to handle multiple platforms.
12. Not Having Enough Visibility On Social Media
If you don’t have a social media strategy that makes your brand more visible on social media then you are missing a great opportunity to be seen to millions of people who are on social media.
Brands are resorting to social media marketing to reach a global audience, to increase brand awareness, to acquire customers, to build market and to promote new markets.
Your social media profiles should be clearly visible on your company websites, email signatures, blogs, contact us, and any other place that is highly accessed by social media users.
Cross promote your social media profiles on different social media platforms. Conduct contests and quizzes, give away coupons and prizes, take part in relevant forums, participate in community chats and make yourself visible in various social media platforms. This will drastically improve your visibility on social media.
13. Not Having An Efficient Social Media Team
If you are thinking that you can do social media marketing without having a proper team, then it’s one of the big mistakes that you are doing. So how important is it to have a team dedicated to social media marketing?
A social media company has to consider various factors to make a good impression on social media platforms. When your organization is big or is involved heavily in social media marketing, then it can become difficult for a single person to handle your social media activities. Hence its most important for brands to have a dedicated social media team to manage this task. Having a team of people who are social media experts will ensure that the workload is distributed and ensures there's always someone who is available to address customer queries or mentions on social media.
It takes a team of social media professionals to continuously watch out for opportunities and offer real-time customer service which can take your brand to the next level.
14. Not Following Social Media Policy
A company should have a strong social media policy with details on how the employees and all other related parties should behave online. They should have clear laid out policies on how to write and comment online when they are representing the company.
Good social media policy can save the company’s reputation and will make sure that their internal corporate matter is not being exposed in public on social media pages.
A social media policy should be able to control what employees are saying about the company, to safeguard information, not to disclose the customer details, and also how to react to the negative comments about the company.
Conclusion
When a brand is attempting to perform social media marketing, there may be many hurdles and mistakes that will not allow you to reach your potential. Knowing the mistakes and correcting them will be the only way to move forward. Steer clear of the mistakes mentioned here and have a better chance of enjoying successful social media marketing.
Submitted By
-
shameel
933 KARMA
Submit a Comment