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Have you ever thought why your competitors’ social media marketing efforts were successful more than yours?!
The answer is the common mistakes your business committing in social media marketing without noticing that you’re committing these mistakes or how much they are causing negative effects for your business presence across all different social media platforms.
Whether you’re experienced in social media marketing campaigns or taking your business first step in the social media marketing world which is full of opportunities to your business to reach more desired segments of potential customers and increase the current base of your loyal customers.
The digital world is full of different platforms to invade as your business desired crowd is active on these platforms including search engine and social media platforms with more than half of the earth population active on different social media channels.
The high crowd is the source of many value-adding opportunities for your business as you can achieve many goals of social media marketing while targeted suitable desired audience including:
- Brand awareness: reaching more and more potential customers who are active on chosen social media platforms for your business marketing activities
- Leads Generation: increasing the follower base while creating valuable content while increase follower desire to contact your business as they’re interested in what your business offers
- Sales-Volume Boosting: with higher engagement from the audience who are interested in what your business offers, the potential for higher sales volume will be beyond expectations
- Better Customer Service: professional social media monitoring activities will increase your customers’ satisfaction as their inquiries and complaints will be solved quickly
- Improving Brand Reputation: with a higher satisfied customers and followers base, the magic of “word-of-mouth” publicity will occur on social media networks as your brand reputation will improve from positive feedback and reviews.
There’re more and more potential benefits of social media marketing that your business will take advantage of if your social media marketing activities avoid the common mistakes that will be discussed later in this article.
Many businesses experienced a “rocket-start” for their social media marketing campaigns with increase in reach and engagement metrics for a temporary period then failed to maintain that performance due to many reasons including not having a detailed strategy for social media marketing or focusing on specific platforms with no active potential customers on these platforms or failing to handle negative reviews.
The mistakes are common among businesses interested in social media opportunities to grow their business and requires devoted attention to prevent them from existing with simple solutions that will be also discussed in this article soon.
Committing a mistake is not the end of the journey for your business social media marketing activities but how you will handle this mistake and precautions applied to prevent that from happening again is what will define if your business can recover from that situation or not.
The solution for any issue or situation is defining where and why exactly the deviation from expectation occurs. Your business reputation, customers base, sales volume plus many other aspects will be affected if you didn’t perform corrective actions to handle what went wrong in your social media marketing plan and how you can avoid the common mistakes.
In the following section of this article, we will discuss in details the common social media marketing mistakes and how your business can avoid them to achieve desired results from the online presence on chosen social media channels.
If you’re afraid of wasting time, efforts and money with your in-house marketing team or external social media marketing agency without achieving the desired results then, you have to focus on optimizing every step of creating a professional online presence for your business and avoid common social media mistakes committed by many businesses.
The common social media marketing mistakes and their solutions are:
What are your business goals out social media presence? Who is your targeted audience? Which social media platforms are suitable for your business? Will you use an in-house team or an external social media agency for your campaigns? What are the suitable metrics to evaluate your performance?
All previous question should be answered by a well-crafted social media marketing strategy that will guide your business social media activities to achieve what your business aiming for.
Starting without a clearly defined strategy is most common mistake businesses commit which will lead to negative consequences as your social media marketing activities will be chaotic with no goals specified and metrics that were chosen to evaluate whether social media presence has added value to your business or not. Therefore, without strategic planning for social media, your campaigns will head to failure eventually.
You shouldn’t run away from negative comments and reviews as they are opportunities to fine-tune your business performance and tips to improve your products and services to satisfy targeted customers.
Business social media accounts are effective channels for customer service, improving the brand reputation and the overall business performance as they provide direct communication option with a personal touch to increase customers trusts and transform negative impressions to long-term relationships with your current customers.
Individuals responsible for managing your business social media channels should be professional in all aspects especially social media listening and monitoring actives to replay quickly and professionally to messages, comments, and reviews whether they’re positive or negative comments.
Many businesses commit the mistakes of ignoring, deleting, delaying replies or replying unprofessionally with a solid tough corporate tone to customers and followers inquires, complaints and reviews.
It takes 12 positive reviews to correct 1 negative review as humans are skeptical and you can’t earn their trust easily unless there’s nothing doubtful about your business products or services and that can be achieved with professional social media moderation activities.
Facebook messenger for business provides customized instant replay options that will improve your business social media monitoring activities as customers will experience instant professional replies to their inquiries.
It’s a thin line between the friendly and unprofessional tone of voice when communicating with your business followers on social media and you should stick to the friendly human approach for communication while respecting your audience rather than typical robotic corporate replies that are not suitable for social media audience.
It is disturbing and annoying when someone is always bragging about himself and anyone will lose interest quickly if all topics are about one thing.
The same is for “social” media marketing as from its name is about people and effective when you add continues value for your customers to earn their trust in order to choose your business products over available alternatives.
Promotional content should be limited on your business social media accounts as the audience will lose interest in continuous promotional content and you should follow the “20% — 80%” rule with only one promotional post in every 5 posts published on your business accounts.
The other posts should mainly be concerned about adding value to followers with insights and tips in your fields of expertise besides explaining your corporate values that should align with your social media content, tone of voice.
Avoid contents that attract audience with no interest in what your business offers with gifts and giveaways to increase your business followers base as theses audience will not add any value for your business today or in the future but replace that with rewarding current top engaging fans and customers with free products to encourage other followers for raising the engagement level.
The more valuable content (blog posts/infographics /creative designs/interesting videos/shared related content) you post, the more trust and interest your business will gain from targeted audience (current and potential customers) which will contribute positively in achieved defined goals for current and future social media marketing campaigns.
The major factor affecting the success of social media marketing activities is “Content”.
Many mistakes are committed in social media content marketing creation and distribution including:
- Publishing content with no predefined content calendar and no consistency
- Not diversifying the content published & sticking to descriptive text content
- Over Publishing and sharing many posts daily with related and unrelated content to your business niche and targeted audience
- Creating and sharing content that is not suitable for the targeted audience demographics and interests
- Sharing inappropriate content which offends specific races, genders, cultures, religions or the whole audience
- Publishing content with many grammar and spelling mistakes with no proofreading or editing and the can be avoided using many tools like Grammarly extension
- Using few call-to-actions (CTA) and losing the opportunity to increase desired conversions
The quality of the content is more important than frequency but your social media marketing team should achieve success on both levels by creating quality unique content in different formats with time and efforts devoted for proofreading and editing and posting according to a predefined content calendar.
Social media platforms are different in many details regarding active users’ demographics, suitable content for each platform, suitable voice, tone and communication options.
It’s resources consuming choice for your business to be on each social media platform regardless if your targeted audience is active on each platform or not or it’s a suitable platform for your business marketing campaigns.
Facebook marketing is a more suitable marketing channel for business to customer (B2C) businesses while LinkedIn marketing is more suitable for business to business (B2B) businesses at it is more professional platform and you should choose only the suitable platforms for your business solutions and targeted audience and don’t waste your business resources on non-useful social media platforms for your business.
The voice tone and content published should not be the same on each platform as the active users on each platform are not the same in characteristics and demographics and should be treated differently.
Your business marketing campaigns should be aligned together as cultivating marketing campaigns while targeting the same audience and customers’ segments will result in achieving a higher return on investment (ROI).
Isolating social media marketing campaigns from other marketing channels (Commercial ads on TV and Radio – Print outdoor advertisement – Search engine marketing – mobile marketing – email marketing) will reduce your social media campaigns added value as it will promote different products and services with unfamiliar different style and language than other marketing channels.
Your business social media strategy should define suitable performance evaluation metrics to identify whether your campaigns have reached the desired goals.
Vanity metrics like the number of fans and followers on each social platform is not a valid metric to evaluate social media marketing strategy performance as there’re more suitable metrics to decide whether you achieved desired goals or not including:
Reach metrics: interesting valuable content goes viral and reach more audience including your business social accounts followers and public active audience on social platforms as an indicator for creating valuable content.
Reach metrics are posts reach, posts & videos impressions and if that reach was organic rather than paid reach with paid social media advertising campaigns.
Engagement metrics: the most important evaluation metrics are engagement metrics as social media is all about communication and engagement and you gain more exposure and recognition with more engagement achieved.
Engagement metrics are % of engagement for published content including likes, comments, shares out of the total number of reach and impression, number of direct messages and number of mentions received for your business across different social media channels.
Audience demographics: The demographics audience engaged with your business social media accounts including gender, location and age range will define if your campaigns managed to reach targeted audience and encourage them to interact and follow your business or not.
Conversion metrics: generating leads through social media marketing campaigns is one of the important metrics as the more leads generated, the higher the parentage of success you achieved in increasing trust and engagement with your brand and motivated audience to perform desired conversions.
Most of social media platform provides direct personal communication options like Facebook messenger for business pages and Twitter DM that are effective channels for communicating easily with potential leads and converting them to loyal customers.
Establishing a social media policy to guide your in-house marketing team operations will reduce the risk of social media marketing as your business social media policy will focus on many important aspects including:
- Confidentiality of business internal data and issues as it you should not be discussed in social media accounts
- Professional attitude in communicating with social media fans and followers
- Preventing the possibility of sharing offensive inappropriate content
- Securing social media accounts credentials (emails and passwords)
After establishing a clear policy to follow, unfortunate incidents will gradually decrease and vanish to provide a professional atmosphere for your business marketing team.
Many businesses choose the option of launching paid advertising campaigns on social media channels as it is a cost-effective advertising solution enabling businesses to reach a defined segment of potential customers with their advertising campaigns through Facebook ads, Twitter ads or any other platform advertising options.
There are many common mistakes committed in social media that will reduce the efficiency of social advertising campaigns by wasting the dedicated budget without achieving desired results including:
- Choosing platforms to advertise on with no active users of your targeted potential customers
- Choosing campaign objective not aligned with the campaign goals (for ex: reach objective for a lead generation campaign)
- Targeting the whole active users rather than a specific audience with an interest in your business products or services
- Ignoring social platforms insights while choosing the campaign schedule to show ads for users in their active hours
- Choosing budgeting option not suitable to your allocated budget and the campaign goals (daily budget or one budget for the whole campaign)
- Creating the ad content with no creativity and choosing inefficient call-to-action
- Choosing the wrong metrics to evaluate the advertising campaign performance
When you have decided that social media platforms are suitable channels for your business marketing, then you have to decide whether to hire or depend on in-house marketing team or seek professional help from an experienced social media agency.
A huge mistake is relying on incompetent team or agency to manage your business social media presence with insufficient resources for social media marketing.
Your in-house team should consist of skilled copywriters, creative graphic designers, professional social media moderation and advertising specialists at least with allocated to resources and healthy working environment.
If you choose to hire external social media agency, then you should focus on choosing the agency based on their portfolio of previous successful social media marketing campaigns and their cost-effective customized solutions suitable for your business goals and allocated budget.
We hope that this article will guide your business to commit fewer mistakes in social media marketing and prevent any common mistakes from happening in the future to achieve the desired defined goals of your business social media presence.
We are always available to answer all related questions to marketing, advertising, and technology solutions in general and specifically related to social media marketing and management solutions.
Contact Sendian Creations today to improve your business social media marketing performance
[kc_custom_heading text="How does social media marketing help businesses? " font_container="tag:h2|font_size:30px|text_align:left|color:%23000000" use_theme_fonts="yes"][kc_single_image image="25145" img_size="large"][kc_empty_space height="20px"][kc_custom_heading text="When social media marketing goes wrong? " font_container="tag:h2|font_size:30px|text_align:left|color:%23000000" use_theme_fonts="yes"][kc_empty_space height="20px"][kc_custom_heading text="Common social media marketing mistakes & solutions " font_container="tag:h2|font_size:30px|text_align:left|color:%23000000" use_theme_fonts="yes"][kc_single_image image="25152" img_size="large"][kc_empty_space height="20px"][kc_custom_heading text="#1. Starting without a social media marketing strategy" font_container="tag:h3|font_size:20px|text_align:left|color:%23000000" google_fonts="font_family:Allerta%3Aregular|font_style:400%20regular%3A400%3Anormal"][kc_empty_space height="20px"][kc_custom_heading text="#2. Committing social media monitoring mistakes " font_container="tag:h3|font_size:20px|text_align:left|color:%23000000" google_fonts="font_family:Allerta%3Aregular|font_style:400%20regular%3A400%3Anormal"][kc_single_image image="25148" img_size="large"][kc_empty_space height="20px"][kc_custom_heading text="#3. Focusing on “promotion” over “social” " font_container="tag:h3|font_size:20px|text_align:left|color:%23000000" google_fonts="font_family:Allerta%3Aregular|font_style:400%20regular%3A400%3Anormal"][kc_empty_space height="20px"][kc_custom_heading text="#4. Common social media content marketing mistakes " font_container="tag:h3|font_size:20px|text_align:left|color:%23000000" google_fonts="font_family:Allerta%3Aregular|font_style:400%20regular%3A400%3Anormal"][kc_empty_space height="20px"][kc_single_image image="25151" img_size="large"][kc_custom_heading text="#5. Focusing on many non-useful social media platforms " font_container="tag:h3|font_size:20px|text_align:left|color:%23000000" google_fonts="font_family:Allerta%3Aregular|font_style:400%20regular%3A400%3Anormal"][kc_empty_space height="20px"][kc_custom_heading text="#6. Isolation from other marketing platforms & campaigns" font_container="tag:h3|font_size:20px|text_align:left|color:%23000000" google_fonts="font_family:Allerta%3Aregular|font_style:400%20regular%3A400%3Anormal"][kc_empty_space height="20px"][kc_custom_heading text="#7. Evaluating performance with vanity metrics " font_container="tag:h3|font_size:20px|text_align:left|color:%23000000" google_fonts="font_family:Allerta%3Aregular|font_style:400%20regular%3A400%3Anormal"][kc_single_image image="25155" img_size="large"][kc_empty_space height="20px"][kc_custom_heading text="#8. Operating without a social media policy " font_container="tag:h3|font_size:20px|text_align:left|color:%23000000" google_fonts="font_family:Allerta%3Aregular|font_style:400%20regular%3A400%3Anormal"][kc_empty_space height="20px"][kc_custom_heading text="#9. Social media advertising mistakes" font_container="tag:h3|font_size:20px|text_align:left|color:%23000000" google_fonts="font_family:Allerta%3Aregular|font_style:400%20regular%3A400%3Anormal"][kc_empty_space height="20px"][kc_custom_heading text="#10. Choosing social media agency or in-house marketing team" font_container="tag:h3|font_size:20px|text_align:left|color:%23000000" google_fonts="font_family:Allerta%3Aregular|font_style:400%20regular%3A400%3Anormal"][kc_empty_space height="20px"][kc_custom_heading text="Summary " font_container="tag:h2|font_size:30px|text_align:left|color:%23000000" use_theme_fonts="yes"][kc_empty_space height="20px"]
