Most businesses understand the importance of social media marketing and the potential it holds, but without the proper knowledge and guidance, it’s very easy to make mistakes and fall into bad habits.
Below we have compiled a list of some common social media marketing bad habits and how you can avoid or fix them.
LACK OF PERSONALITY – TOO CORPORATE
Creating quality graphics is all well and good but too many graphic only posts can give your page a rather bland look and appear too corporate. To improve engagement on your page don’t be afraid to inject some of your personality into it, whether it be sharing humorous industry related memes/videos or uploading photos of what your business/brand is doing that day.
Storytelling is a key but often underused factor in social media marketing, giving your viewers an inside look into your business will not only give them something to share and talk about, but it shows them that your page is run by a human that they can connect with, and not an automated service
METRIC MISINTERPRETATION
It is very easy to assume that if a business/brand has a large social following that they are on top of their social media marketing, but that’s not always the case. Many people are more concerned with gaining masses of followers no matter what industry/area they are in simply so their social pages show these numbers, this is called ‘vanity metrics’.
A large following of random people can be good if your sole aim is brand awareness but not if you want to use your social channels to grow your client base, it also makes tracking your analytics more difficult as you can’t get an accurate understanding of your target audiences habits.
It is much more effective to work on gaining an organic following of similar businesses and people who work/live in the area you operate who may turn into potential clients.
LET DOWN BY WEBSITE
A common habit made by businesses is putting all of their efforts into their social media marketing and neglecting their website.
Although creating good quality, consistent content for social media is great, if the website it links back to isn’t up to the same standard of quality, it becomes redundant.
You must ensure your website is up to scratch, something as small as a spelling error/typo can be a red flag to a potential client resulting in them leaving your site.
MASS EMAIL CAMPAIGNS
Mass emailing non-subscribers is the online equivalent of junk mail and it can be very damaging for a business’s reputation.
The most effective method of social media marketing should be based around creating personal relationships with an interested client base. Sending mass email campaigns to an audience of unsubscribed people is old-fashioned and ineffective, it can also hold legal repercussions due to the EU’s GDPR laws that came into effect in May 2018.
NO SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING STRATEGY
Although in point 1 we talked about injecting personality into your social media pages to avoid looking too corporate, it can be easy to go too far this way and appear unprofessional.
A common mistake made is scattered and erratic posting, to fix this you need to create a social media marketing strategy.
For smaller businesses who don’t have a large social following, 1-2 posts per day is a good place to start, keeping in mind to publish content that educates, inspires and entertains rather than just selling. Creating themes for certain days such as ‘Motivation Monday’ or ‘Throwback Thursday’ is a great way to ensure you always have content ideas and keeps the page looking uniform and professional.
Scheduling tools like Buffer and Hootsuite are also very useful as they allow you to schedule content in advance, so you are not scrambling to create and publish content on the day.
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