Common Social Media Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

According to the Digital Report, 2020 from  Hootsuite and We Are Social. They state that the penetration rate of Facebook in India is about 65%. In other words, over 7 million people in India use Facebook.

When you consider that Facebook only allows you to create an account from 13 years and older and that few very elderly people are on Facebook, that is really a lot. LinkedIn and Instagram follow a distance in terms of penetration with 39 and 36% respectively. Snapchat gets 30%, and we bet that will come as a surprise to many people. And then there is Twitter that achieves 11%.

So if it is not yet clear: social media play an important role in brand marketing, all the more because fellow countrymen spend an average of one and a half hours a day on social media.

The importance of social media as a marketing tool can hardly be underestimated. Yet many companies regularly make mistakes that are easy to avoid. We are happy to list common social media mistakes to avoid them.

Common Social Media Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

• Social media without a strategy

Many organizations still do not take social media into account when determining their strategy. Social media branding is often seen as a side effect but not as a strategic thing. Just like everyone else, you also have a target group, you want to achieve something with your organization and with your online presence. A social media strategy, therefore, entails more than recording how many posts you want to do per day or per week and then just put something on it.

The solution is obvious in this case: make sure you have a social media branding strategy for your efforts. Determine your target group, find out where they are active, and build your strategy around those channels.

You have to think about what kind of content, which visuals go with it, and which tone of voice you want to capture. And your goals are also important. You also need clear measurable goals. This gives you the opportunity to make adjustments and provides interesting data about your target group.
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• Not responding to negative comments?

Negative comments and complaints are inevitable on social media but don’t worry. While a negative response to your Facebook page isn’t fun, it doesn’t necessarily have to be bad. It gives you the opportunity to show that you care about your guests.

It happens to every entrepreneur, but only those who formulate good answers to negative comments show that they are there to help every customer, even with bad experiences. Customer service is an important part of your social media marketing strategy. That’s why Facebook even has two specific metrics about how often and quickly you respond to messages.

• Don’t take a chance on bad photos

Social media is very visual and adding photos to your posts increases engagement. To give you an idea – Facebook posts with images get twice the engagement as those without. That said, it’s just as important to make sure the images you include with your posts are relevant and quality. If your images are low quality, your followers may get the impression that your products are also low quality.

When it comes to Instagram, a platform all about aesthetics, this is a common mistake social media mistake to avoid. Consider investing in a small ring light or find a place in your business with good natural lighting to take photos.

• Do not post regularly

So if everything is right, you have a strategy. And so you have basically determined how often you are going to post something on each channel. But things don’t always go as planned. Colleagues get sick, there is an important meeting, you name it. Then it happens that you do not post important or relevant updates. And if you post less regularly, your content will become less visible to your target group. So a waste of effort.

This is also quite easy to solve. With a content calendar, you can plan a lot of content in advance. There are several tools with which you can program posts in advance. This means that you can invest time in it when it suits you and that you can already provide a lot of content in advance.

That leaves more room for last-minute efforts, and the chances are much smaller that you will not post anything for too long. Of course, it will still take you some time, but if you still want to get started with social media branding, you better do it right immediately.
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• Not measuring your results

Again, it is important to have a strategy. You record KPIs in it, which are in principle measurable. With social media, you can create a significant impact in the field of marketing. Your first campaigns may not deliver the success you want. You are still looking for the right timings and you do not yet know what will and will not work. But without data, it is difficult to know where to make adjustments.

Measuring is knowing. By measuring your results, you enable yourself to make interim adjustments if you discover that your campaign is not running as expected. With that knowledge, you can take your next campaigns to the next level. Some platforms have more analytics options than others. Take a moment to see which data you can find on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and so on.

• Too much commercial talk

Another common problem is that many brands and organizations see their social media channels too much as promotional channels. You will then see one commercial message appearing after another. And you rarely or never see other content. And those other pieces are so important to appear human and credible on social media. If you pay too much attention to promoting your products or services, many people will lose interest.

Of course, you can sell, also on social media with the aid of the best social media marketing company. But make sure to balance your promo talk with non-commercial messages. Because it is the latter who increases your credibility and builds trust. A best practice to keep that balance is to post a maximum of 1 commercial message for every 4 non-commercial messages.

• Treating all social media platforms are same

Each social media branding strategy channel gives you different options, a different reach, different formats, and the like. There are probably a lot of people in your target group who use different social media. But they also have different objectives themselves, and they also use one channel at other times and more or less often than the other.

So if you are going to post on different social media, make sure you also tailor your content to that channel. If it concerns a different target group, you will also have to offer them different content, use a different tone of voice and provide different images. Also, pay attention to hashtags: they don’t work the same way everywhere, and you have to adapt them equally well to your intended target group.

In any case, you have to provide other formats with the same images, because they are different on different channels. Also, make sure to re-upload your videos from Youtube to Facebook if you want to use them there too.

• Not having proper content

If you want to do it anyway, do it right. Your target audience will feel it when you post something that is incorrect. They spend, as mentioned in the introduction, more than enough time online to know what is and what is not relevant content.

To avoid this ensure that you can plan content well in advance with a content calendar. Then you have time to think a little longer about the right words.

A little more time to find that one perfect image. Have someone else read your content too. The person who writes content often looks completely over spelling mistakes or sentence constructions that are incorrect. Also, check whether that one post fits within the strategy you have determined in advance. This way you avoid coming up with second-rate content.
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Conclusion

They were the common social media marketing mistake to avoid. With these, you also immediately know how to avoid them. Prevention is better than cure, isn’t it? Do you have feedback on this, or would you also like to share mistakes that you often see on social media? Please let us know, we are very curious about your input.

Saikirankumar S

Saikirankumar S is the Content marketing specialist at Geekschip.com. His writing covers topics such as social media, digital marketing, technology, and mobile applications. When he is not writing, you’ll find him in the garden with his plants to connect with nature.

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