5 Social Media Mistakes To Avoid
1. Over-Promotion
Your social media’s primary objective should be to connect with your community and share useful information so that you can gain valuable insight into your audience and how your business products or services can help meet their needs.
Probably the biggest mistake many small businesses make is to treat every post as an advertisement for their business. The statistics clearly show most consumers will unfollow a brand if they post too many ads with a hard sell.
While there are no hard and fast rules, many small businesses can avoid this problem by following the 80-20 rule of posting (i.e. 80% of your posts should inform, educate and provide value and 20% promote your product or service)
2. Ignoring your audience
Any business that posts without engaging with followers, not responding to comments or ignoring feedback about the content will hurt the chances of success with social media.
Any negative feedback should be immediately addressed either publicly or in a private message. Ignoring negative comments on social media will turn away followers and hurt your brand.
Building a brand by building trust and credibility with your audience is key. In the long term, it is what will gain you more followers who will look to your brand for expertise and valuable information about your specific industry.
3. Posting irrelevant content
Keeping a consistent pattern with your posting schedule is an important concern according to the search engines (Google / Bing).
Many marketers agree that Google will only send traffic to sites with high-quality content. If the quality of the content is not deemed to be valuable to your followers (i.e. only to you) you will hobble your ability to increase your reach and follower growth.
All your content needs to align with your business’s products, services and overall branding. Similar to blatant over-promotion previously mentioned, more than 50% of consumers unfollow brands due to irrelevant content.
Conversely, the majority (59%) of consumers say they’ll interact with a brand when they have a great experience with that organization, while 47% reach out when they have questions about a product or service.
4. Focusing on quantity over quality
You have probably heard the phrase “spreading yourself too thin” many times in your business and personal life; it is no different with social media.
Many small businesses believe that to succeed, they must be posting on all the different platforms with little regard to audience or applicability to their industry, product or service.
Work with your social media professional to determine the correct platforms for your business. It’s better to have a strong presence on one or two channels than a poor one on five. Always ensure that your content aligns with your marketing and social media strategy.
It is always tempting to want to post more and more content. Ignore that temptation in favor of posting less, but more relevant, high-quality content for your audience.
5. Not revising your strategy based on metrics
Social media mistakes are bound to happen to any business. Social media marketing is not a black and white science, but your social media professional can monitor and review key metrics with you to help you better navigate the common pitfalls discussed here and improve your chances to succeed with an established strategy.
Having a social media strategy and key performance indicators (KPI’s) that are reviewed regularly will help you find the right channels and audience for your business.
In summary, you can prevent the above social media mistakes by utilizing the right networks for your business and with value-driven content that works to reach and attract your audience and meet your social media goals.
