Are You Making These Social Media Marketing Mistakes?

Are You Making These Social Media Marketing Mistakes? ITVibes Design & Marketing, The Woodlands, TX

Social media is a well-established marketing tool for businesses worldwide. However, social media networks can present a challenge for companies used to advertising on different platforms. Unless you monitor the rapidly changing standards and rules for every social network, it’s too easy to fall into bad habits and accidentally sabotage your marketing efforts.
Social media was created to connect people around the world, encourage conversations, and bring us closer together. Since social media platforms were designed with individuals in mind, businesses can struggle to find their niche on social networks and learn to connect with their customers. If you have doubts about your business’s own attempts to use social media successfully, you’re in the right place! Let’s look at a few common mistakes businesses make on social media and how you can fix them.
Is your business making these social media marketing mistakes? Here’s how to get your marketing campaign back on track. #ITVibes Click To Tweet

Ignoring Audience Feedback

Your audience is talking and posting about you, but not always on your page. How often do you pay attention to mentions or links your audience provides elsewhere? In social media marketing, one of the biggest mistakes you can make is forgetting to employ social listening. In addition to keeping track of every time a social media user mentions you, social listening systems also analyze the conversation they were having and try to understand the context of the mention. This gives you the chance to say thank you for positive mentions or offer a solution for negative mentions.
On a less involved level, sometimes you’ll be lucky enough to get direct feedback from your audience. For instance, someone might tweet at you to say that a page on your website is giving a 404 error. That’s your chance to thank the user and correct the error quickly before more people are inconvenienced.

Posting too Much “Fluff” Content

How much engaging, informative content are you sharing? Pushing your brand or business at the expense of all else does you no favors and makes you look too focused on sales rather than connecting with your customers. On the opposite extreme, consumers don’t expect (and often don’t want) to see memes and more ridiculous internet content on a business’s social media. Are you falling into either one of these traps?
Instead of constant promotions or just copying the rest of the internet, find ways to create and promote content that offers real value to the customer while also being relevant to your industry. A few excellent examples include:

  • Blog articles
  • Infographics
  • Polls
  • Videos
  • Influencer articles
  • Promotions

Your target audience will appreciate the high-quality content, and you’ll notice more engagement on your social media pages as a result.

Identical Posts on Every Network

It certainly saves time to copy and paste the exact same message onto your company’s Facebook, Twitter, and other social profiles. But you may be shooting yourself in the foot by doing so. Different social networks have different standards for optimized posts. Twitter famously has a strict character limit (though it recently doubled), Facebook’s hashtag system is somewhat lacking, and LinkedIn discourages the use of emojis and more “casual” social media staples. As a result, what’s perfect on one social media network might be trash on another.
Additionally, even if you take the time to optimize hashtags, character count, and more for each site you use, don’t fall into the trap of using the same wording for the rest of your message. This just makes you look lazy. Plus, audiences on different platforms expect different things. A casual post may perform well on Facebook but seem unprofessional on LinkedIn, for example. Learn to discern what speaking style or type of content marketing is best for each platform.

No Long-Term Strategy

Finally, what’s your long-term strategy with social media? As a business owner, you obviously want to turn a profit, but there are multiple steps to achieving that ultimate goal. Set goals on social media to get yourself closer to a profit and make a plan to achieve your goals. Knowing your long-term strategy and sticking to it will invariably enhance your social media presence and result in more success.

Pro Tip: Constant posts and updates with no clear plan won’t help your business’s online presence. A detailed strategy and posting schedule will keep you on track and aware of your progress.

Get Your Social Media Strategy Back on Track!

These all-too-common mistakes can prevent you from enjoying true success in your social media marketing strategy. Customers want genuinely interesting content and quality service even over social media, after all. Take the time to examine your posting history and any strategy you have moving forward. Could it use some work? Don’t let these mistakes keep happening–find a solution today!
Connect with us to talk to our team about how to avoid social media marketing mistakes in the future.