8 Social Media Marketing Mistakes to Avoid
By Justin Toy
Everyone hates to dwell on mistakes. However, being aware of our mistakes is one of the best ways to learn and improve our future behaviour. In the rapidly changing and dynamic field of social media marketing, mistakes are some of the best ways for us to grow and develop as marketers. While learning from your own mistakes is a valuable lesson, there’s no reason to make mistakes if you don’t have to. Here is a list of 8 common mistakes that social media marketers make and how to avoid them.
1) Focusing on quantity over quality.
Not all followers are created equally. Social media is a numbers game and the primary reason to adapt various social media channels is because you want to have as many followers as possible. However, focusing only on the number of fans you have is a big mistake. Instead, focus your attention on the quality of your followers. Which would you rather have; 10 Facebook fans that don’t engage with any of your posts or one fan that likes or shares one post per week? Focusing on engaging active fans will help maximise the reach and potential of your social media campaigns.
Having a massive social network may look impressive, but connections that don’t engage with your content, share, tell others, or have any potential to convert into a lead or sale don’t benefit you. Forget about buying followers or spending countless hours trying to build meaningless reciprocating followers (I follow you, you follow me). Let people come to you and connect with you because they want to. A few of them are worth far more than hundreds or thousands of superficial connections.
2) Not converting your followers.
Followers are great. But remember, the main point of social media marketing is to drive sales. A lot of companies, especially younger ones and those who are new to social media, lose track of this goal. Followers and advocates can give a boost to your ego; but if they aren’t producing sales, you need to change things up. Selling on social media is a fine art. You have to learn to balance content that people simply “like” with content that gets them to take a step into your sales funnel.
3) Talking About Yourself Too Much
People don’t use social media and connect with other users in order to see advertising. If you think your social media pages are billboards, you’re in for a rude awakening. Social media isn’t about you; it’s about interactions around valuable content and ideas. Only after you make that happen can you get away with a little self-promotion.
4) Not Knowing Who You’re Talking To
Marketing starts with identifying your target audience. Every successful product and service provides a solution or benefit to a specific group. All successful marketing shows that group why one brand is the best source for that particular product or service. Determine the common characteristics and interests of your narrowly defined target market. Use your social media pages to engage with them on those topics, finding subtle and clever ways to tie in your industry, and watch your efforts pay off.
5) Using Too Many Sites
Auto-posting content and links to every single social media site may seem like a great idea that will maximise your exposure. However, this kind of strategy leads to a number of superficial accounts on sites that your audience doesn’t actually visit. Rather than establishing a ghost presence on every social media site on the web, establish an engaging presence on just one or a few relevant networks. Interact with connections on your page and theirs. Showing interest in others will generate interest in you. Furthermore, learn the best practices of each individual site that you use. For example, are the users most active during business hours or at night and on weekends? Does the site use hashtags? How do videos perform? Every social networking site is quite different, as are the ways to become successful on them.
6) No Social Media Marketing Strategy
Many social media marketing efforts fail because they don’t have a clearly defined social media marketing strategy. You want the messages that you are putting through social media channels to resonate with your audience. However, the reality is that social media users are constantly being overwhelmed with messages and information. Your messages have to break through the noise and reach your target audience. Moreover, your message should be able to make a deep impact on its target users so that you stand to gain from your social media marketing efforts. This can only happen when you have a clear social media marketing strategy.
A social media marketing strategy sets clearly defined and measurable goals. It also includes a clear social media policy and lays out a regular schedule for producing content. Moreover, you should not be using the same social media marketing strategy for every social media platform. The audience on different social media sites varies as should the content you are sharing.
7) Ignoring Your Audience
Social media marketing channels allow you the opportunity to connect and engage with your prospective customers. Connecting with your prospective customers allows you to build a strong relationship. However, this can’t happen if you make social media a one-way street. Your audiences are put off when they see continuous advertising efforts in their news-feeds. Instead, you should be focusing on building a two-way street with your target audience where you get an opportunity to connect with your audience and deepen the relationship with them. In other words, your focus should be on educating and relationship building rather than on selling.
8) Censoring Criticism
People will take to social media to voice complaints and unpleasant experiences. While there is a temptation to remove these criticisms, you can risk diluting your brand image. When your audience discovers that you are trying to hide the fact that you were unable to fulfill promises or meet expectations, their trust will be shattered. Instead, you should listen to them and publicly try and solve their problems and queries. This would be much better for your brand image because then people would feel that you are taking them seriously while at the same time you are taking responsibility for the mistake.
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