To err is human; but some errors can cost you a fortune. Marketing your brand on social media doesn’t have to be hard or expensive, but when you follow the right strategies to impact the right audience, your brand visibility skyrockets.
A lot of small businesses incorporate social media in their marketing plans, but cannot recognize the importance of using these social media platforms in the right way. There are some social media marketing mistakes that companies make often, which can cause a negative impact on your business.
Let me share with you 7 common social media marketing mistakes you can avoid at all costs when you are trying to promote your brand to a global audience.
Shouting Out Loud
#ShoutOutLoud is a very popular hashtag to use on social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. It’s good that as a startup or a small business, you’re enthusiastic enough to promote your brand louder to get attention on social media. But when you promote your brand excessively, it can cause a negative influence on your followers. They can take it as spamming your target audience.
You need powerful, specific hashtags to brand yourself on social media. You can engage people on your social media accounts and make them follow your brand organically by providing information that adds value to your customers instead of bragging too much about your brand.
Not Tracking Your Social Media Platforms
Uploading stories, videos, photos every day is not the right way to attract followers on social media. Consistency is a brilliant strategy to follow, but without tracking your social media results, you may not know your progress. Every small business must track their social media performance to create clear social media strategies with objectives and goals.
Without actionable insights, you cannot measure the success of your social media marketing strategies. When you track your social media analytics, you can create content, identify the right social networks for your company and understand your competitors to build a better marketing strategy that outweighs them. Begin gathering your analytics to cultivate better relationships with your audience.
Failing to Use Content Variations
15 words on Twitter will not do magic for your brand nor is writing 1500 page blog posts going to be effective enough for your audience. The way you use various content formats on your social media is going to be the key to brand recognition and awareness.
If you want your content marketing on social media to be popular, precise and active, you need to use videos, photos, blogs, infographics and other forms of content to increase your followers. Graphical content is easier to read and grasp than plain text. Change your content delivery method on social media platforms to bring a lot of followers.
Vague Social Media Marketing Strategies
Most companies decide on having a social media strategy but don’t make it audience-specific, leading to a downfall in their brand awareness. Every business needs a strategy that is sync with their social media audience so that they can cater to the needs of their audience easily via these social media platforms.
When you cannot have a social media marketing strategy for your brand, you might lose to your competitors, cannot keep customers, and also miss out on opportunities for better targeting and optimization. When you have a specific marketing strategy with a concrete plan of action and budget, it is easy to influence your audience through social media.
Too Much Automation
Most brands approach social media marketing as a robotic act rather than a manual wholehearted task. There are so many automation tools in the market for brands to engage themselves in promoting their business on social media platforms. But posting impersonal content on social media platforms is cringeworthy. Audiences love personalized services, and that’s why they approach physical stores. Likewise, having personalized content on social media platforms will engage audiences to interact and make purchases to a specific brand.
You can definitely use automation tools to post images and content on your platforms but don’t overdo it as it can make you lose your audience with too much irrelevant automatic content.
Ignoring Your Social Media Audience
Social media stands for engagement and if your brand doesn’t appreciate your followers, comments, tags, and posts, it can cost you badly. You must create a social media team that specifically monitors and responds to every conversation to display understanding and professionalism in your audience.
Building a strong social media presence does not rely only on your marketing budget or the type of content you post on these platforms. It only depends on your engagement with your social media followers. Ignoring your customers’ views, feedback, questions, queries and even negative comments about your brand will drive your customers to your competitors. Focusing on your social media audience like a hawk can elevate your business.
Look-Alike Social Media Platforms
When you start a small business, you are inclined towards selling and improving your profits rather than focusing on social media platforms and marketing. When this happens, there’s 90% chances of your social media platforms to look alike. Each social media platform is unique and you must learn the language of each platform to speak to your users effectively.
When you learn to see every social media platform as a separate entity with its own unique opportunities, you will discover how your brand can perform on each social media platform to increase your exposure. You can achieve different results on different social media platforms, so be open to experimenting social media on a larger scale.
Social media done right can make your brand shine bright!
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