Social media marketing guides tend to offer tips like “Be authentic!” and “Make great content!” with the promise of great results, but these changes don’t always deliver.
So, instead of telling you how you should run your social media, we’re here to talk about 5 common social media mistakes that you need to avoid if you want your campaign to achieve great results.
-
- Inconsistent posting
- Focusing on quantity over quality
- Being on all social media platforms
- Posting identical content across all platforms
- Not targeting a specific audience
Inconsistent posting on social media platforms
Usually, people are super enthusiastic when they first start posting, resulting in a lot of posts, often. However, this enthusiasm declines pretty quickly if they don’t see the results they were hoping for straight away and they stop for a while, before starting up again when they remember just how beneficial having an active social media presence can be. This cycle of starting and stopping results in inconsistent posting.
The solution to this problem is simple: Routine.
Think of your social media as a heavy object. The rule of velocity states when the object is stationary, it requires a lot more effort to move. However, once the object is moving, or in this case, you have your posting routine up and running, it’s a lot easier for it to keep moving in the direction you’re pushing it. As you continue to follow a routine with your efforts, you’ll find that your results increase without much extra effort. You’ll find it easier to block out time for posting, come up with ideas for content and naturally engage with followers in a human way.
Ensuring that your social media is consistent will not only drive customer engagement, but it will also give the impression that your company is consistent in general. Consistent posting also helps to train the algorithms that determine what shows up on your followers feeds on that specific platform, making it more likely that you will show up on people’s feeds and naturally boost exposure.
Focusing on quantity over quality
When posting on social media, sharing your content and blogs is important to customer and prospect engagement. By that logic, posting as much, as often as you can, should be your goal, right? The company Buffer found that the opposite is true.
Buffer were posting a whopping 14 times a day on Facebook and Twitter, sharing every single blog and podcast they could to fill their huge quota. In doing this, they found that they weren’t getting much engagement. However, when they started to limit their posts to one or two per day, including only their best content, their reach and engagement skyrocketed.
Ensuring that your content resonates with and brings value to your audience is key to succeeding on social media.
Being on all social media platforms
Being successful on social media isn’t something that happens overnight; There is a steep learning curve. Getting to know the platforms, how they work and how to manipulate the algorithms to work with you takes time.
Starting with one or two social media platforms allows you to get to grips with them and start to succeed without dedicating all your time to being active on each platform. This also allows you to test whether these platforms resonate with your buyer personas.
Imagine if you set up a great profile on Instagram, but your prospects and customers don’t use that platform. The time and effort put into developing your profile will have been a waste, and you’ll be starting from scratch with the next platform you try.
The key is to figure out where your people are going before jumping into every network, and then select the right place to start before investing your time and effort.
Posting identical content across multiple platforms
Each platform is set up differently, with varying algorithms. These decide what content it likes and should be shared to people’s feeds, and what content it dislikes and buries.
When posting content to multiple platforms, you’ll get much better results if you tailor your content to that specific platform. For example, add hashtags when posting to Twitter, or include a video when posting to LinkedIn.
Not targeting a specific audience
Knowing your audience is vital to building an effective social media plan. Usually, companies use buyer personas to understand their prospective customers and nurture them into buyers. But, this type of understanding is usually overlooked when it comes to a social media plan.
Knowing your audience allows you to adjust your tone and content, create more precise targeting and makes it much more likely that your prospective customers will see you on their feeds.
Now that you know what not to do…
Get posting!
To learn more about social media and improving your marketing, check out our other blogs or get in touch
