The business world glorifies social media marketing — spending thousands of hours and dollars daily to create a working social media strategy.
Businesses appear to understand correctly that marketing through social media can revolutionize their brands, leapfrog their competitors, and grow their companies all at once.
Every business wants to see encouraging signs like:
- Pageviews
- Increased follows
- Likes
- Retweet
However, one question brings everything into perspective:
How do you turn that interest into revenue? After all, many businesses complain about not having financial success on social media.
For the most part, most businesses commit horrifying yet all-too-common social media marketing mistakes — mistakes that can hurt any brand hard.
These mistakes include:
1. Getting Too Sales-Focused
One thing every business should understand is:
People follow businesses on social media if they find some value. They want to benefit from connecting with your business.
No one follows an account to see ads. You need to bring value to the table.
Yes, you must have an end goal in mind with any of your social media marketing campaigns, earn revenue, and tackle what matters most for your business. It might be:
- Creating brand awareness
- Driving traffic to your website
- Generating new leads
- Increasing revenue
- Offering social customer service
- Increasing mentions in the press
After all, without a goal, it’s hard to see the big picture.
However, to get the most return on the time and resources you put on social media, you need to understand one thing:
Deliver value to an audience that will find your content valuable.
That means instead of constant promotion of your latest products and services that your business offer, you have to:
- Create superior content.
- Initiate interactions.
- Reach out to prospects.
- Follow other people.
- Make useful comments.
- Like other people’s social media stuff.
With such an understanding, you’ll enhance your brand’s credibility and attract leads gradually. Otherwise, your business will quickly lose followers.
2. Posting Without A Clear Strategy
It’s common for businesses to struggle with focus when starting using social media marketing.
Many take it upon themselves to run their own social media channel to realize the intense posting routine. Then, they quickly get overwhelmed or lack the content to post on their profiles.
This is a sure recipe for disaster.
It’s vital you have a clear posting strategy or higher an agency to shoulder all the heavy social media marketing tasks. You have to:
Adopt The Right Posting Frequency
There aren’t hard rules to optimize your posting frequency, but you need to lean toward posting frequency you can sustain. What determines the number of times you should post include:
- Who’s managing your business account (If you’re a team, you can run original content every day).
- Social platform (For instance, posting numerous times a day on Twitter is acceptable but highly frowned upon on platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn).
- Your business goal (That determines what you want to post on social media and how frequent you can post)
Posting more frequently can be overwhelming to your customers and annoying as being sold to. You don’t have to bombard people with tons of meaningless posts from your business account.
3. Having Incomplete Profiles
A small but fatal mistake you can make is filling incomplete information about your company.
Your profiles need to be complete to offer a positive and memorable impression on potential customers — you need to give them a reason to connect with your brand.
After all, lots of people search online for companies before they can do business with you.
You don’t want to give them a reason to go to your competitors because you didn’t take a few minutes to add the company description, contact information, or profile picture.
4. Thinking Every Social Media Platform is the Same
Every social network has its potential.
That’s why a one-size-fits-all mentality is a fatal mistake and can cost you a lot in your social media campaigns. The same photo on Instagram might not work perfectly on Facebook.
Your initial step should be to find the social channel(s) where your target customers hang out most, then invest time and resources creating content that fits those platforms.
In other words, you need to manage separate social networks differently. What works on one will not necessarily work on the others.
For example, if your brand targets businesses as clients on social media, you’d want to hang out most on LinkedIn because many professionals connect on LinkedIn.
On the flip side, if your business targets end-consumers, you’d want to build a strong Facebook presence because it’s the second most used in the world.
However, your business can get traction on multiple social media platforms.
To succeed on multiple social media platforms, you need to know how to create interactive content for the different social media platforms.
5. Abandonment
Abandonment on social media come in different forms:
- Complete post abandonment
- Failing to address complaints
- Assuming subscribers’ responses
Complete Post Abandonment
The worst community management offense is creating a post as a brand and dropping off from re-engagement completely.
Social media is a tool for conversation, and failing to keep engagement will keep you off the mind when consumers are offline.
You need to spark conversations that will become a reference point for your brand when someone wants to buy your product at the end of the day.
Failing to Address Complaints
Another huge mistake businesses make on social media is failing to engage customers when they have complaints.
Social media should make it easy for your business to respond to feedback promptly to create a trusted brand.
For that reason, your business’s social media presence should work to resolve issues when your clients have negative experiences. This will show the public that you care about your customers and the integrity of your company.
Your business needs to embrace negative feedback from your clients.
Assuming Subscribers Responses
Social media is all about interacting with the audience and engagement. When you assume responses, you limit your business’s ability to build a community.
Not responding to your audience through social media limits how you make connections with your target market. There are plenty of reasons you should make comment replies as a key element of your social media strategy:
- It presents a means to provide customer service (that can help a business to retain the existing customer and win new ones)
- It create rapport with the customer (you can make your business appear personable and approachable)
- It’s a means to present your business’s professional front (comment reply is one way to establish and maintain your brand voice across all social networks)
No one enjoys being ignored, and a lack of response can tell customers that they aren’t important.
Remember that social media is not a billboard. You don’t want to miss out on the social interaction that comes with social media platforms.
If you’re going to be active, the right approach is responding to customers and interacting. It isn’t enough to post content and ignore customers when they respond or ask questions.
6. Failure to Build a Personality
No one enjoys interacting with a dull or robot-like business on social media because it limits interaction. It’s nearly impossible to resonate with your customer or shape the way people feel about your product, service, or mission without a brand personality.
Failing to build a personality cannot elicit an emotional response in a specific consumer segment or incite positive action that can benefit your firm.
You can’t skip creating the personality for your business because you want to be:
- Authentic
- Unforgettable in the mind of your customer
- Valuable that your customer can’t search for value anywhere else
- Trustworthy
Your social media personality trait should help you achieve all the above.
7. Monotony
It’s excellent to identify a passion point for your audience to succeed with social media marketing. However, beating it to death ruins the points.
For instance, if your followers love soccer, you can offer them content that resonates with them in different ways — not simply by switching the teams you mention in the same post but by getting creative with content.
You need to remember that the internet is a resource, and you should serve to inspire and influence what branded content you create.
If you feel like you’re running out of ideas, you should do more research about what your fans connect to. Only remember to keep it on brand, or you risk misappropriating your information.
How Can You Avoid The Costly Social Media Marketing Mistakes?
Even experts make mistakes.
Fortunately, you have a choice. Learn the hard way and bump your head against the same mistakes as everyone else, or learn from the failures of others.
You don’t want to take the first choice.
Instead, you’re going to note the mistakes above and knock them out one by one. You’re going to create social media campaigns that grow your audience and earn revenue.