Four Social Media Marketing Mistakes Your Brand Must Avoid

All marketers want to steer clear of making social media marketing mistakes on behalf of their brand. Big brands have teams of professionals. But usually not small businesses. This article shows you how to skip the blunders and offers tips for social media success...

The Easiest Social Media Marketing Mistakes Made By Businesses Trying To Get It Right

Social media has become a valuable part of most marketing strategies. When done correctly it can bring brand awareness and exponential business growth.

What first began as an entertainment tool has evolved into an excellent resource for brands to connect with their target markets. And social media popularity isn't fading out any time soon. A study by Statista states that approximately 92% of marketers use social media for their marketing functions.

If you’re looking to steer your organization in a purposeful direction, here are four social media marketing mistakes your brand must avoid.

1. Focusing On Your Follower Count

As essential as followers are to:

• Increase your brand awareness
• Earn leads
• Reach out to new customers

It’s important to avoid collecting followers like you do souvenirs and antiques.

The critical thing here is what you do after connecting each fan or follower. Your website and social media channels won't see more traffic if you don't interact with them. Fans and followers are people. After liking and following your page, people expect you to engage and provide content worth their attention.

2. Assuming Social Media Is A Quick Fix

Many business owners and entrepreneurs view social media as a fast way to gain:

• Brand awareness
• Marketing campaign awareness
• Volumes of new customers
• Profit influx - Cha-ching!

For their marketing efforts. There are exceptions, but for the most part, that isn’t a realistic result. Social media marketing is a marathon, not a sprint.

Carefully planned and executed social media strategies can instantly impact and yield results, However, those are usually campaigns with high dollar budgets and savvy digital marketing teams at the helm. In turn, it is best to consider social media marketing as a continual process rather than a short-term project.

Social media can produce significantly more optimal results in the long run. The impact will be gradual organic growth that will make any paid campaigns more successful and cost efficient. However, your commitment determines your level of success.

Regularly delivering new, relevant content for your followers is essential for your social media marketing strategy. Investing in this will result in consistent social engagement on your social channels which leads to a viral effect and quality organic growth. That's the sweet spot!

3. Posting Boring And Irrelevant Content

Everything you post on your social media channels will either gain you a follower or cost you one. When your brand's content regularly appears irrelevant or overly promotional to your followers, they'll either scroll past your post or click to unfollow your page.

That's a recipe for getting lost in the social media space. For instance, if yours is a real estate or office rental business, posts related to beauty and healthcare products will probably appear irrelevant to your followers. Perhaps one of the biggest social media engagement mistakes.

It’s tempting to resort to trendy memes, especially when your content supply seems empty. Yet, if that type of content becomes a large percentage of your posts it is actually less effective since there’s a good chance they've already seen the material. You risk looking clueless or desperate for engagement which isn't the message you want to send to your audience.

To avoid getting lost down the rabbit hole of posting for the sake of posting and cluttering your social pages with content your followers are not interested in, here are some top tips:

• Add value. Over and above anything else your content should add value for your followers life. It doesn’t have to change the world but if you want your content to be viewed as relevant it needs to add something positive to the day for your followers. For example, if you are a food brand, share a recipe that involves your produce. If you are a car dealership then consider posting tips on car maintenance. Something that will be relevant to your business that helps the viewer with their life. Bonus points if it makes them look cool to share the content. Remember, they are giving you time ... they have spent it looking at your social media account. Make it worth it!
• Get creative. Social media is no longer a place for adding a bland bit of text. Social media posts that do well include: Infographics, memes, GIFs, and well edited photos. Get people drooling over what your brand shares by adopting a saas business model. Canva is a good content creation tool. An online subscription tool (with a free option) providing users with the ability to design and create their own graphics (and more) easily syndicated on social media. 

• Ask questions and use polls. Social media is designed to be social. Your posts will do well when they receive lots of likes, comments and shares. A great way to get authentic interaction on posts is to ask questions or post polls so your followers can actively engage. This will help organically improve your reach and keep users interested in what your brand has to say.

4. Not Monitoring Your Analytics And KPIs

Numerous businesses and brands do it. Instead of tracking their entire social media performance, most brands only focus on follower growth when measuring success. Actually, one of the common early social media mistakes by companies.

Just like you treat other business activities, set yourself measurable social media goals and regularly track your analytics to see your true performance. Social media has advanced to the point where it’s backed with high-end analytics. Fortunately, there are several free third-party apps to help you monitor and measure your social media success.

Final Thoughts On Social Media Marketing Mistakes

Without a savvy social media professional in place, leading an aggressive social media marketing strategy, your team may make one or all of the above social media marketing mistakes.

The good news is that social media changes all the time, so there is always something to learn or improve, as well as newly released tools to help your team be more effective. In that way, social media is forgiving, as there are ways to successfully hurdle and move forward.