4 Social Selling Mistakes Startups Make in Their Marketing Plans
Social media has become a very powerful marketing medium in recent years. Unfortunately, many brands still fail to use it effectively, because they don’t have a sound strategy in place.
Their biggest mistake is focusing too heavily on metrics that don’t have a strong correlation with their marketing success.
Is your social media team making the following mistakes? It may be time to change things up.
Obsessing Over Likes and Shares
Almost everybody defines the popularity of their posts by the number of social shares they receive. While getting a lot of social shares can boost your ego, it doesn’t mean your marketing campaign will be effective.
In theory, social media shares are a great indicator of your marketing strategy. However, likes and shares don’t mean much by themselves. Many people click the like, retweet, or share button without ever visiting the website or even looking at the domain name.
Instead of focusing on social shares, you should be concerned with engagement. Determine if people are actually coming to your site, commenting on your posts, and interacting with your brand.
Focusing Too Much on Page Views
Most brands are focused on page views. This is a mistake you want to avoid.
Page views are slightly better for gauging following our interaction than social shares, but they’re far from perfect. Many brands inflate page views by using Clickbait strategies. Unfortunately, they often attract vaguely interested followers and compromise their image with low-quality clickbait posts.
Take a look at some of the comments on Reddit or Facebook. You’ll find people often complain about the quality of the articles with the most traffic. These posts tend to have intriguing headlines, but the substance of the article doesn’t support it.
While clickbait posts may work for websites that are monetized with advertising (at least in the short term), they are useless for ecommerce sites.
Also, page views may only reflect the time and resources invested in promoting your content. You may be spending a tremendous amount of money to earn a tiny ROI.
Conversion rates and time on site are much better metrics to focus on. This is especially true for companies involved in-app marketing. Time on site is completely irrelevant when your goal is to promote a mobile app, so focus on downloads and app usage instead.
Thinking Quantity of Followers is More Important than Quality
Your brand obviously needs engaged followers to fuel your social media marketing strategy. However, you’ll need the right followers to gain momentum. Many followers are not engaged and are unlikely to drive your conversion goals.
Don’t focus on the number of followers. Focus on meaningful comments, feedback, and the overall quality of connections. Think about re-purposing your content for multiple social media channels and consolidating your efforts for maximum efficiency. Use digital business card platforms to create long-term, ever-growing assets that turn your followers into subscribers.
Monitoring Changes without Context
You should be closely analyzing changes in your important metrics, such as ROI, user engagement, and conversion rates. However, it’s pointless to track these metrics without looking at causal factors.
While measuring changes in your marketing metrics, you should be looking for correlations between different elements of your social media strategy. For example, did your conversion rate rise significantly after you started investing in native ads? This could indicate that your native ads provide higher-quality traffic than your other traffic sources.
Turn Your Social Selling Strategy Around
Social selling can be tremendously effective, but you have to go about it the right way. If you are focusing on the wrong variables, then your campaign may be doomed from the beginning.
Following these tips can help you get your social selling campaign on the right track. Best of luck!
