Do you know that more than 50% of the world’s population uses social media platforms? With multiple users in one place, a social media marketing strategy has become the key to success. Whether it’s a small general store or a large multinational corporation; Try to build your unique presence online.
In attempting to bring products and services to market, many businesses make mistakes that cost them their credibility, choice, and ultimately – their customers. Social media marketing requires a well-planned strategy that includes measurable goals, content, and analytics. Often, entrepreneurs and marketers throw content on the wall to see what will stick; They enter the market without creating any blueprint to bring them success. When using social media for your business, here are some common mistakes that you should avoid in 2021.
1. Avoid Automated Personalization
The online platforms are full of real people who love to see other real people and their work. Therefore, it is advisable to prioritize social media automation tools only if you want to offer specific brand details to your ideal customers. Sometimes using Chatbot to reply to comments of your customers is never going to work. While it’s okay to rely on marketing software for some small tasks, avoiding them in the big picture is always the best bet.
2. Never Pay for Followers
In December of 2014, Instagram underwent a massive purge of fake accounts. It resulted in many brands and celebrities losing thousands, sometimes millions of followers. To appear more popular, these brands bought up followers.
Paying for followers always comes back to bite you. With Instagram, its followers dwindled, making the brand seem unauthentic. You can also buy followers for Facebook and Twitter. Purchased followers are known as ‘vanity followers.’
It makes your profile or page appear to be more popular than it is. Some marketers argue that having a seemingly large number of followers will attract more followers while repelling real followers. If a user comes to your profile and finds out that you have many followers but hardly any engagement on your posts, they will know that you have paid for followers.
Instead, aim to build a fan base using viral content or ads. With this, you will get real fans who will connect with you and potentially buy from you. Fake followers are essentially robots. They can’t make you money. And once you buy followers, you can’t get rid of them. You cannot undo your fake followers; the only way they will go away is if the social media site has a purge similar to Instagram’s.
3. Avoid Inconsistency
Every business needs to be consistent with its brand presence and efforts on social media. It means keeping your brand and related assets in line with your style guide and staying away from breaking promises. For example, share new articles you publish on your website every day if you’ve promised to do so.
4. Don’t Ignore data
You can’t expect to see success in any business in today’s world without some planning and analysis. You need to analyze the data to know what action to take or what type of strategy might work.
Thankfully, getting your hands on data isn’t as difficult as it used to be. Nowadays, you can quickly get the required information in a matter of minutes.
Researchers have done many studies, and there are tons of tools that can provide you with real-time data on your performance. For example, Facebook offers an “Insights” section on Pages that provides various statistics on how healthy a post is performing on a particular page. Also, we can use several third-party tools to measure the performance of your social media marketing campaign.
5. Avoid Being Active on Every Platform
Creating profiles on every platform is a social media marketing mistake that you should avoid. Instead, your brand’s business, targetting market, and advertising goals are essential aspects to decide which social networking platform you should engage.
If you are a B2B firm, LinkedIn can provide you favorable results as compared to Pinterest. LinkedIn focuses on building professional associations, and Pinterest is more focused on showcasing personal and social media content.
Managing every social networking platform at the same time is just a waste of valuable tools. So instead, try to find out which social networking platform allows you to get the desired audience and focus on the impact.
6. Integrate Social Media Buttons on your Website
Creating a website is becoming easier over time. Thanks to site-building tools, even people with no technical background can create and publish a website. Fortunately, the message “a website is essential” has reached SMBs on a worldwide level. But, whenever we talk about social media marketing, integrating your social media profile with your official website is also essential.
To be successful, you need to consider at least putting social media buttons on your website. Always try to have a link to your business site on your social media profile.
By doing this, you will create an online ecosystem for your audience to like and share your content, services, products, offers, and promotions. You can even go a step further and add your social profiles to Google results so that they appear when people search in your niche.
7. Not Dealing with Negative Feedback
Nine out of ten brands make such a mistake. Whenever a negative comment comes to the fore, they develop a lame excuse while addressing it on social media. Some avoid it; some apologize with folded hands.
Everyone is afraid that negative feedback will tarnish their reputation. It is one of the most significant risks of social media. But instead of ignoring or apologizing for negative comments, brands should see this as an opportunity to improve. Social media provides an excellent opportunity to start a conversation with the person who left feedback.
Negative feedback is an honest opinion about the user experience of a product. The more detailed the feedback, the easier it is for the brand to understand its shortcomings.
Customers, especially those who leave negative feedback, expect brands to take them seriously. Of course, customer expectations are constantly changing, but you should still do your best to meet their needs, especially when your ideal customers take the time to tell you what they think of you.
Customers do not expect a formal apology but assure that the product experience will be better next time. So instead of pouring money into ORM campaigns, brands should clean up their acts and learn from the feedback.
Still, negative feedback isn’t always a sign of a problem. Sometimes, it may just criticize the brand. So instead of censoring such users, brands should still react to those messages somehow.
When you encounter negative feedback, engage as quickly as possible. Then, create a response team responsible for decisions and manage social media channels during the incidents. Are you still facing challenges while creating your social media marketing strategy? You can contact us. Our experts are here to help you. Call now!