Social networking sites provide plenty of opportunities for you to grow your brand influence, promote your products and services, increase your site traffic, engage with potential customers, and many more. However, even the most experienced marketers tend to make social media marketing mistakes that can spoil and make campaigns useless.
Social media platforms offer a substantial platform for marketers and advertisers to interact with billions of online users from across the globe. Using these platforms to your advantage may sound easy, but if you keep committing the same errors, you will just end up wasting money and resources.
So, to help you improve your marketing strategy, here are some of the most common mistakes you should avoid when working with your social media campaigns.
Over Self-Promotion
While it is a best practice to keep brand campaigns exciting and engaging, never forget that social media platforms are designed to build connections with people. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn have one common goal, to provide a platform where people can create online communities and interact with each other.
You can self-promote, but don’t overdo it. Use it to your advantage but make sure that your content serves the brand. Ensure that for every self-promoting post that you make, you publish at least four or five engagement posts.
Always keep in mind that engagement posts attract audiences and that the views you get for your content will add value to the limited number of self-promotional posts you have.
Careless Content Stories
One of the most common social media marketing mistakes that many tend to commit is posting stories carelessly. Social media is a powerful tool to create a great impression and build your company or brand image. However, posting irrelevant and non-sensical content can significantly affect how people view your company or your brand.
So, always stick with your brand purpose and avoid posting content stories that don’t serve your brand or will not contribute to your growth. Keep in mind that just one post is all it takes to make or break your image.
Boring Content
Again, social media is primarily designed to create engagement. If there is one thing that you should avoid when planning your campaigns, it’s boring content. Please, avoid it at all costs.
The primary purpose of using social media is to help you gather followers and convert your target audiences to customers. If you keep posting dull content, no one will click your call-to-action or even look at your page.
Make your content exciting and ensure that you use the right call-to-action in all of them. Make it clear if you want people to follow you or if you want people to go to your site.
Dishonesty
Trust is one of the foundations of an excellent brand-customer relationship. In this age and time where nearly everything is posted and searchable online, lying is not the best option if you want to build your influence and create a meaningful customer relationship on social media.
When people ask you something about your company, services, or products, they expect you to answer them honestly. Some will ask the most irrelevant questions, but that’s part of the game. While not all answers will please your potential customers, answering honestly will give you the leverage to guide the interaction in a positive way.
Ignoring Criticisms and Negative Feedback
Pleasing everyone is impossible. At some point in time, regardless of how great your brand is or how entertaining you believe your content is, someone will criticize it. No matter how awesome your engagement with everyone is, you will eventually annoy somebody.
Handling criticisms and negative feedback on social media can be tough. However, choosing to ignore them will not do you any good either. They will not go away and ignoring them may only intensify the problem. Social media platforms make it easier for people to complain about bad experiences in the services they received or the products they bought.
When you are at the receiving end of unpleasant feedback, you don’t turn your back and pretend it’s not there. You face it, tackle the problem, and engage with the complaining party positively. Don’t let criticisms drag you down. Instead, use them to build trust and show people that you care.
Being on Multiple Platforms
Managing one social media page and growing its following may sound like an easy task. But, you will not definitely say the same when you are managing accounts on multiple social networking platforms.
While it is a wise marketing strategy to extend your reach on other platforms, it can be time-consuming and taxing to monitor and manage all of them if you are doing it alone. This is one of the most common social media marketing mistakes that often lead to content stories getting less engagement and devalues them.
Before you sign up on multiple social media sites, take into consideration your target audience first. Identify where your target audiences spend their time online and then focus on those platforms instead. This will make your strategy more efficient and your content more visible to the people who should see it.
Not Optimizing Content
Social media can give you a massive advantage over your competitors when it comes to engagement. However, creating unique, relevant, and entertaining content stories is sometimes not enough to boost your engagement.
Remember, search engines are still crawling all posts on social networking sites. If you want to increase your content engagements, make sure that you always optimize your content stories for search.
Don’t be overconfident if your content is performing well. Instead, study how your competitors engage with their audiences and determine the search engine optimization techniques that they employ in their campaigns. Create your social media marketing strategies based on the success of your competitors’ methods.
Add keywords and relevant hashtags to your posts. These words and phrases are heavily used by Google and other search engines to optimize the results that they show to their users. The more you use keywords in your social media content to identify your brand, the more it becomes easier for people to find you.
Key Takeaway
Committing social media marketing mistakes is inevitable. However, it is essential that you learn from them and you take the necessary actions to correct them. Never underestimate the power of social media platforms and use them wisely to your advantage.