5 Social Media Marketing Mistake: You Should Avoid

Businesses and people both make blunders from time to time. It’s easy to make mistakes in social media marketing that can have a serious impact on your social media strategy or your company’s reputation.

Mistakes come in many forms, but the five listed here are the most fatal to a social media campaign. They’re simple to create but challenging to escape. Fortunately, they are also simple to avoid if you know what to look for.

Not Having a Long-Term Commitment

We’ve all seen it: a company that’s sure social media will boost their business launches a Facebook page, a blog, or accounts on Twitter and LinkedIn. Nonetheless, after returning a few months later, you’ll see that the pages look almost identical to how they did when the project first began.

This blunder is often associated with the idea that if you construct it, people will come. Social media, however, is not a film. A beautiful profile picture, bio, and layout do not guarantee views or new friends. These are earned through consistent effort put into communication and engagement. Only 20 minutes a day are required. However, you can’t neglect the fundamentals such as daily user interaction, weekly page updates, and frequent profile picture and cover photo swaps.

Too Much Reliance on Machines

You can get a lot out of automated apps that help you pre-schedule content for your social media strategy, but be careful not to abuse them. Social media posts that include Twitter handles (@Twitter) or hashtags (#keyword) are a major annoyance. It sends the wrong message to your Facebook friends and Pinterest followers, who may think they’re not as important to you as your Twitter followers. This could be an expensive mistake because making them feel unimportant increases the likelihood that they will hide your posts or stop doing business with you.

How do we fix this? Make sure that your posts on each platform are distinct from one another. The best social media management tools will either automatically delete hashtags or make it easy to remove them before publishing to specific networks.

It’s acceptable practise to schedule some of your posts in advance. However, you shouldn’t rely on “canned” or pre-planned content for your social media campaign. The point is socialisation, so between 25 and 40 percent of your posts should be actual exchanges with other users. Engage with the people you retweet by answering their questions, commenting on their posts, and congratulating or encouraging them. If you want to grow your online following and make a name for yourself, stop hoping that someone will stumble across your content and click on it and start engaging with your audience.

Living in a City After It’s Been Hit By Traffic or Has Disappeared

Have you ever encountered someone who updates their social media accounts 25 times in 10 minutes? When people try to “post when they have time,” it can cause a backlog of posts, prompting their followers to hide the poster’s new updates so that they don’t take over the page.

The post-ghost town is the polar opposite of this concept. We’ve all come across sites with no new content in over two months. That makes followers question whether or not the page’s admin takes social media seriously, or even whether the business itself is still operating.

Building a content strategy and updating each of your chosen networks daily is the answer. If you can only pre-schedule one post per day for a week, that’s still better than nothing. Then, when you have some free time, you can spend a few minutes responding to comments and possibly engaging in a conversation with other users.

If you don’t post frequently, most of your followers will forget about you and your business. So, if you want to succeed on social media, you need to commit to posting frequently.

Avoiding questions or dismissing criticism

Many businesses have their public relations, marketing, or sales departments post to social media, while their customer service, support, or product management departments deal with customer inquiries and issues. As a result, a system that forwards social media customer service questions to the appropriate department, as well as guidelines for how to handle the question until an appropriate response can be made, is crucial.

One must answer each and every comment, post, and private message. In today’s world, customers have come to expect instantaneous responses; waiting more than 24 hours for a small business or 4 hours for a larger one is unacceptable. Demonstrate to the poster (and anyone else who reads your response) that you care about their concerns and questions.

No Conversion Strategy

Let’s be honest: the majority of businesses participate in social media with the intention of making sales of their wares and services. But, failing to implement a conversion strategy is among the most expensive blunders that can be made in social media. Everyone enjoys seeing images of adorable puppies, but if you don’t own a company that deals with pets, publishing pictures of adorable pups might not be the ideal strategy to turn followers on social networks into paying clients.

In order to accomplish this, you will need to direct people to your website, your blog, the opt-in sites for your email marketing campaigns, and the sign-up pages for the information you wish to download. It is to your advantage to have multiple points of connection with each individual.

Multi-channel communications isn’t optional these days. With so many messages vying for customer attention, having multiple ways to communicate with your network is essential.