Social Media Marketing (SMM) is a crucial tool that can either grow or hurt your business. SMM gives your company character and maximizes the opportunity for your brand to engage with its customer base.
Social Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn allow your business to spread the brand message and post content related to your services that may deem useful for the consumer. In order to help you start off with an effective Social Media campaign, here are 15 common mistakes to avoid when managing any of these platforms.
1. Absence of SMM Strategy
The biggest mistake that brands make when starting a social media page is forgetting to develop a strategy. A profile may make the mistake of posting a lot of content that brings in enough followers and attention, then suddenly disappearing. It is key that your business has a plan for maintaining its social media presence.
Your brand should establish measurable goals that your social media plan can help you reach. The plan has to include how frequently you post, your target audience, and a team to execute this. Developing a strategy will keep your brand consistently providing high quality content.
2. Not having a social media team
It is crucial that your social media efforts have a fully developed team that organizes your plans and goals for your different accounts. For these roles it is important to choose people who already manage their own social media accounts. These people will be more comfortable with handling situations that arise with your accounts and also effectively communicate with your customers.
Your team should consist of an analyst or coordinator, product expert, and a communicator that can provide your followers with a pleasurable experience.
3. Grammar Mistakes
It is important as a brand to be mindful of using appropriate grammar. It may often be difficult to maintain perfect grammar on posts due to the character limit on some platforms. Although this can be a challenge, make sure to constantly proofread for spelling errors.
From a business perspective, having grammatical errors in your social media posts can make your company seem unprofessional. To some consumers and prospective partners, this may be a small sign of negligence within your company. It is important that your customers trust that you can properly manage anything.
4. Lacking Information
Aside from the content being posted on your page, it is often easy to lack the information needed for people to actually take the next steps and learn more about your business. Customers should not have to search online for your contact information. It is crucial to make the informative process for your prospective customers as efficient as possible.
Your product or service information, phone number and location should easily be visible on whatever profile that you’re managing. If you have a website, also make sure to provide the link somewhere at the top of the page.
5. Misleading Information
As a brand it is important to effectively deliver the message of what your business actually does. On social media, where you have the ability to communicate to the whole world, it can be easy to get carried away and exaggerate what your business can provide. This is temporarily beneficial and will attract followers momentarily, but social media marketing plays a role in maintaining relationships with your customers.
As a brand, you have to build trust with your customers and assure them that they are getting the quality product or service that you market. Having a trustworthy social media page will lead your customers to tell people whom they know about your page and gain your business more followers.
6. Posting Irrelevant Content
Some brands often make the mistake of posting content completely unrelated to their industries or services in order to gain exposure amongst a wider range of people. This may increase likes and shares, but adds no significant value to the customer-brand relationship. It takes complete focus off of what your brand actually provides.
7. Political Posts
DO NOT post about politics or religion. If your business provides landscaping services, your loyal customers won’t want to read about your political views. Content related to your service should be the only things posted.
Topics like this are too bold and may cause conflict amongst the followers that respond to your posts. It may also label your brand as supporting a particular view. This may offend or cause a fraction of your audience to unfollow you.
8. Spam
Spamming is the quickest way to lose followers on social media. Some brands often make the mistakes of automating posts with links or simply posting too frequently. Too much information can become annoying to your followers.
When managing the timing of your posts, it is important to give your followers time to process the information being given to them between each post. Social Media users will find your brand unappealing if their newsfeeds are clogged up with so many posts from your page in just a short amount of time.
If these users still choose to follow you, they may no longer pay attention to your posts and scroll right by information that may actually prove beneficial to them.
9. Brand Inconsistency
A common mistake that businesses make is not keeping their brand consistent across all of their different social media platforms. This can be confusing for loyal followers and prospective customers that may think the brand on one platform isn’t the same as the brand that they’re looking for.
It can also block your brand from being exposed the same way on a new social media profile if people think it is a completely different business. To avoid this, it is crucial to keep your brand’s color scheme and logos the same on every platform that you provide content.
The main goal is for people to recognize your brand instantly, no matter what form of social media they are using. This legitimizes your brand and creates an identity.
10. Unbalanced Text and Graphics
Many social media marketers forget to make the content in their texts stand out as much as the visuals in a particular post. This is because of the common conception that creative graphics in social posts are more likely to draw attention than words.
It is important to understand that the graphics are supposed to attract a large enough audience, while the text informs the audience what the brand does. When managing the content for each post, it’s important to invest the same amount of thought into the writing as the creative graphics.
11. Ignore or Confront Negative Feedback
Negative feedback on social media is actually useful. Businesses often make the mistake of ignoring posts that complain about the services they have provided. Feedback can be used to improve whatever flaws that the business has.
Some businesses think that negative feedback instead hurts their brand image. It actually shows that the brand cares and has quality customer service when they engage in a conversation with that customer on social media in order to work towards a solution.
Customers that want to be taken seriously expect that you assure them with better service next time, opposed to just an apology. It is also key to not argue with the customers and instead figure out what is causing the negative emotions on social media.
12. Being corporate and not personal
Some brands don’t have enough personality or character displayed in their social media pages. Businesses make the mistake of not interacting with their customers. Social media is all about human to human interaction. Consumers trust your brand more when they feel like they’re actually communicating with someone that cares about their needs.
It is important to personalize your posts to each individual user that gives feedback or has questions. Make sure that your profile is constantly and directly addressing and communicating with people. Social Media is the primary tool to remain engaged with your customer base.
13. Being too promotional
Once again, social media is all about human to human interaction. Constant promotion and advertising on your social media page makes it seem as if your brand only cares about sales. Promotional content can be annoying and doesn’t often appeal to the consumer.
The majority of your social media efforts are going towards keeping your customers engaged with interesting content. It is okay to have a promotional post every once in a while, but interacting with your customer base is what’s going to increase sales.
It is important to use social media to gain feedback of the customers that you already have before pushing for new ones.
14. Not Diversifying Posts
A common mistake that brands make is posting the same content all of the time. It is important to remember to diversify your posts. Make sure that you have a wide variety of different content that still keeps your customers engaged with your brand.
This can be done by creating original blog posts and articles, along with posting links to external content that may draw the attention of your audience. Different videos and pictures that may entertain but relate to your brand can also be beneficial. Your profile can also share and repost content from other profiles that specialize in your industry.
15. Having Multiple Profiles on One Platform
Your business should have no more than one profile for each social media platform. Having multiple profiles can be confusing for followers. They won’t know the most important account to follow and may not receive the most useful information that your business provides.
Managing multiple profiles on one platform can also be a waste of time and resources. Make sure to focus all of your energy into managing one account that gains loyal followers.
