Depending on whom you ask social media marketing could be simple or complex. While understanding people and the nuances of how engagement and segmentation on social media work for businesses, there are some aspects of social media marketing that can be simple. Today we will share with you seven common mistakes made on social media that your business can easily avoid.
- Not Filling Out Your Profile Completely: This is probably the most simple and easiest fix. Make sure that your profile is completely filled out. This is an opportunity for transparency, content, and passing information to curious consumers.
- Being too Sales-Foreward: Social media channels are about being social. While it is understood that you are there to sell or advertise your products and services, you should strike a balance between sharing information, interesting, fun, and engaging posts versus sales or advertising posts. You will find the right balance for your business as it varies from one company to another; but most companies do well with a higher ratio of social posts than sales related posts. If you are doing paid advertising or boosting your posts, those will help ensure that your sales message is seen when followers are looking at your fun or informative posts.
- Linking Social Channels Together: If you auto-sync your social platforms, it makes it very difficult to be engaging and socially successful across channels that are on “auto pilot”. If you automate your posts, it goes against everything that is “social” about social media. It also indicates that you think you make your social channels “one size fits all” and that is definitely not the case. Different types of posts work better on different networks; and each channels’ followers respond better to certain posts and not others.
- Using Low Quality Images: This seems like a given, but there are some companies that still do not put a high priority on images and video. Since images play such a large role in garnering attention on social media platforms, it is important to use quality graphics and always include imagery or video whenever possible. The cost and time spent creating high quality images will be returned with increased followers, engagement, and sales for your company.
- Too Many Hashtags: Hashtags are important for social media marketing; however, they are often overused. Hashtags should be used as keywords that your target audience might use to find information about your industry, your brand, or your company. Hashtags are also used to help associate your posts with trending topics. The exact limit for your hashtags should be something that you test, but most likely four or five hashtags are plenty to get your keywords in or identify with a trending topic. One or two words with a hashtag will make their impact.
- Ignoring Messages: Direct messages are present on every social network and should not ever be ignored. Even if the message is silly or unimportant, the social channels are keeping track of your messages and often display these metrics to potential customers or potential followers. Consumers wanting to get in touch with you on social media might be turned off if they see a low response rate. Most consumers now expect to see a 100% response rate and return time within a few hours at most. If you have to research an answer, then you should respond to let them know you are researching an answer for them. The faster you can respond the better for your metrics and customer satisfaction too.
- Failing to Monitor or Measure: As with any marketing effort, your success depends on measuring results. This is where social media monitoring can really help; not just with measuring results, but giving your marketing team intelligence on a whole host of different metrics and statistics. When you are more informed about what audiences are saying in the media, then you can be more prepared to offer what the people want and like most.
Summary and Takeaways for Your Company
We hope that these tips on what mistakes not to make with your social media marketing have helped shape the success of your marketing campaigns. Most of these are simple mistakes to correct. Others can be fixed with some testing to find what works best for your company and your unique set of followers and consumers. Once again, the mistakes to avoid with your social media marketing campaigns are not filling out your profile completely, being too sales-foreword, auto-syncing different social channels together, using poor quality images, too many hashtags, ignoring direct messages, and failing to monitor or measure results.
