There are a million right ways to market a product or service, but at the same time that are just as many ways, if not more, that you could be doing wrong.
Marketing on social media is both simple and complicated – while there are many tried and true marketing rules most common sense, this doesn’t mean that you can become an excellent marketer just by reading a psychology blog or subscribe to HubSpot. Marketing is something that requires experience, knowledge, statistics and data, and even then you can still get it wrong.
Still, it’s not hopeless. After all, successful social media marketing campaigns are executed every single day by millions of companies, so there has to be a formula for doing things right, and there are many ways to make your marketing campaigns successful.
One component in your recipe for success involves knowing the what things to avoid so you don’t make these mistakes in your own campaigns. Here are 13 things you will want to make sure that you steer clear of.
#1 – Posting Social Media Content with No Strategy
New business owners often fall into this pit-sized mistake over and over – and it’s even worse with the millennials. Let’s say that you are a small business owner and you have a good amount of followers (more than 10,000) on your personal Twitter, so you think that you can get that same amount and more on your business account using the same methods.
This happens, but very rarely. How you treat your business social media should be vastly different from any personal account you use, unless your personal social media accounts are used specifically for branding and business development.
Here’s an example. If you post quite frequently on your personal Twitter – at least 10 -15 times per day, and all you post is mostly personal stuff or content that your friends might appreciate, but your posts provide no value in anyway to someone who doesn’t know you, you need to ask yourself if you would follow an account like this?
Social media marketing takes strategy, precision, thought and analytics. When you post content with no forethought, your chances of success are greatly diminished. Take a minute and think about why you followed the last 10 Twitter, or 10 Instagram business pages? What were they posting that made you want follow them? I am pretty sure it wasn’t personal content. It’s super important to have a plan and post content that provides value to your followers and a reason to keep coming back. Keep the personal stuff on your personal facebook account.
#2 – Making Too Many Accounts All at Once
Another early mistake is going all in during your first shot at a Social Media strategy. You know all the sites you want to make accounts on, like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. You make all four accounts and set them all up, and then you realize that now you need to produce content for every one of them…….. and they are all very different.
If you are a small business owner, and you don’t have a social media team yet, it can be challenging to spend the time needed to truly get results from Social Media.
When you’re just starting out, pick one or two platforms you feel will be the most successful for you in terms of engagement and lead generation and that you feel you can manage the daily work. If you already have too many social media accounts right now, reduce the number to 2 and focus solely on making those 2 pages successful for you. If you feel that you need to be spread across more networks due to the nature of your business and you don’t have a team of people to assist you, you could always look at outsourcing to a social media agency to assist you.
#3 – Paying for Tons of Fake Followers
If you use Twitter for personal purposes, you’ve probably gotten some likes, retweets and many follows from an account that’s advertising itself to increase your followers. Many of these accounts offer you followers in the range of 1000-10,000 followers to build up your numbers quickly.
Many websites and celebrities have actually been found to employ these services to boost their follower counts – but is it actually worth anything?
The short answer is no. While it might feel nice to see your follower count rise on social media, the reality is that you’re wasting time and money since these followers aren’t real, and they won’t actually engage with you or your content. You may also lose these followers overtime, as Twitter and Instagram both tend to remove all fake followers a few times per year from accounts if they see that followers are fake or if you account grows very quickly. Worst case this could lead to ban of your account for violating user terms. It’s always best to focus your social media marketing strategies on building relationships through content, not building numbers through unnecessary means.
#4 – Being Too Brand-Focused
This mistake might seem strange to you – isn’t the point of marketing to push the brand? When you watch a commercial, many of these ads focus their entirety on pushing the product or service in question.
Unfortunately, the attitudes of social media users operate differently than how we used to get marketed to years ago. All that was needed 10 years ago was seeing a product or service enough times and if you needed it at the time you would purchase it. Heck, even if you didn’t need it, if the product or service was displayed in a unique way that grabed your attention chances are you would still buy it!
When you watch an ad, you know exactly what’s going on – but today there is so much information on the web, people are constantly researching, looking for reviews, and getting feedback from other people who have experience with the product or service. Consumers want knowledge in and around a brand and they usually want to see a good amount of content from someone before they decide to purchase from you.
On your own social media platforms, people will follow you because of the content that they find interesting, so you need to offer something more than just post after post about how your brand is doing, why you should buy products under your brand, etc…
One great way to engage with an audience is create and post valuable content. Reach out and start conversations with related businesses and consumers, and make sure your social media posts offer some kind of tip or advice to the follower. If people are happy with your content and you have provided value to them overtime that will come to you when the time is right. Now this is not to say just sit back and wait for people to come to you when they are ready, because that may never happen.
I always suggest to focus on producing and posting 90% good quality content, and the other 10% is where you can market your products and services. If you have provided them with enough good content you will be able to build your audience and your subscriber list on your blog, then when you reach out to them with an offer they will feel like they know you a little better.
#5 – Using Too Many Hashtags
Now, it’s been proven that hashtags will greatly help you get more reach and engagement on your social media posts. However, using too many hashtags can have the opposite effect on your social media marketing.
Some businesses get a little too overzealous with their hashtag use. #If #your #sentences #on #Twitter #or #Instagram #look #like #this, then you need to take another look at this. Instead of trying to desperately grab at any random search someone might type into Google or Twitter, try to make your hashtags valuable.
This practice is also a basic turnoff to social media users known as (hashtag spam). The challenge here is that while you may get a few more visitors on your posts for some random hashtags that you used, most of your followers find it difficult to read your posts and hashtag overuse makes your page look unprofessional and takes away from the value of your actual post. This will cause most people to unfollow you. We suggest to use 1-2 hashtags on Twitter & Facebook posts, between 5-10 on Instagram, and no hashtag use on Linkedin, since Linkedin doesn’t recognize hashtags. Any higher than these should be avoided.
#6 – Inconsistent or Spam Postings
Here are two scenarios you might find yourself part of on social media:
- 1. You don’t use a social media scheduling tool, so you log into your Twitter and LinkedIn business accounts a few times per week at random intervals when you can find the time. You like a bunch of posts, send a bunch of comments, and then post 5 or 10 articles that you found from the past few days. Then you come back a couple days later to do the exact same thing.
- 2. You constantly have your social media accounts open, and you’re hungry for engagement, so you hunt for related accounts, share content they post by the dozens, and rapidly send out tweets or updates about a current business promotion you’re really excited about.
Both of these situations are very bad.
For the first scenario, you’re being inconsistent with your posting and probably posting too much at the wrong times. When you are running your own Social Media strategy it’s important to space out your posts during the days and times that you followers are online the most. This is almost every day, so you will want to post content throughout the day at many different times. I always suggest to post your content between 9am to 9pm so you have the best chance to reach your audience.
In the second scenario, you’re spamming your followers. Posting too much on social media and over engaging with people doesn’t work as well as posting regularly and consistently so that your followers know what to expect from you. If you post too much at one time and someone sees 4 or 5 post in their feed from you when they log in, chances are they will mute you from their timeline and then none of your content will get through. Every brand is different and some require more content to feed their audience than others, but for most brands 6 times per day on Twitter between the hours of 9am-9pm, 1 to 2 images per day for Instagram, 2 times per day for Facebook and 1 time per day for Linkedin usually seem to work best without overdoing it.
The solution? Use a social media scheduling tool to schedule consistent content at the right times.
#7 – You Don’t Review Your Grammar
Contrary to popular belief, your social media postings should follow the rules of grammar and punctuation just like an essay would. This means including periods, writing in understandable English (or any other language) and proofreading your content before you post it.
While this seems like a minor mistake, the reality is that misspellings and grammatical errors make your content look unprofessional. It’s also not difficult to proof content before you post it OR get someone else to proof it for you. We use Chrome Extensions like Grammarly or Ginger to correct all work before it goes out.
#8 – Not Engaging Enough
Just because you’re posting under a business account doesn’t mean you need to be completely inhuman. Despite the fact that you’re operating as a business’ face online, you still have to put the “social” in “social media.”
It’s important that you are actively engaging with your audience to show them that you care and are interested to communicate with them. Social media users don’t follow your account just to retweet coupon codes or like pictures of your products. They can get that from your website – but what they can’t get from your website is a personal connection.
Consumers use social media for conversations, meeting people and learning more about products and services, amongst, customer service, and purchasing. People also want to speak to people when they are about to make a decision to buy something. If you aren’t going through your mentions and engaging with others, especially those who engage with you, then you’re not marketing yourself properly. Consumers find brands that engage with them on social media more reliable and credible, and they feel more comfortable with you if they feel like you are a real person.
#9 – Not Budgeting Wisely
Social media marketing is known as a very cheap way to get your business visibility, traffic, lead generation and much, much more. However, that doesn’t mean that it’s free.
Start looking into your marketing budget and see where your money is going or where you can place a small marketing budget to get better results for your business. Is your money going to a strategy that’s working? Are you sure which social media platforms are giving you the best ROI?
The solution to this problem is largely based around analytics. As a general rule of thumb when you’re paying for anything, you want to spend money on something that has value. Some social media sites give you more ROI than others – for instance, why spend $100 on Facebook Ads or content, and only $50 on Twitter or LInkedIn when your business is primarily B2B? If you are a B2B company you should mostly focus on Twitter & LinkedIn.
#10 – Not Knowing or Neglecting Your Target Audience
Here’s a question you should take a few moments to answer in your head: who is your target audience?
If you couldn’t quickly answer that question, you’ve stumbled upon a fatal social media marketing mistake – and you’re making it.
Some brands find it’s easy to determine who their target audience is, mostly because they have been in business for awhile and they know what type of customer works well for them and who doesn’t. If you are a newer company you will most likely go through 6 to 12 months just figuring out who your real target audience is, because this will usually change or adjust several times as you grow your business.
A good way to get started is by considering a few of your competitors following:
What is the age group of their products or services?
What is their Socioeconomic status?
Gender?
Occupation?
Geographical location?
Other (medical condition, parental status, etc.)?
Now look at your own brand and find the answers to these criteria. Afterwards, look at your social content. Do these criteria match up with the content that you’re putting out there?
There are millions of people using social media, so you have to know how to find and engage with the subset of those users who are actually likely to engage back. If you’re a company that produces nursery furniture, would you have more luck targeting mothers…. or just casting a wide net and hoping you catch someone who’s interested?
#11 – Controversial Opinions
Social media runs on discovering and creating trends, controversy and heated discussion – but are these things that you should be utilizing for your business accounts?
For instance, recent brands that have showed solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement or the various shootings in America, as well as wildfires in Canada have been given a lot of support. Groups who are in danger or who are marginalized appreciate businesses who have their backs.
At the same time, it doesn’t pay to have an unpopular opinion. There have been many incidents where companies have backed an unpopular opinion or political candidate and they end of being the brunt of abuse and online backlash just for voicing their opinion.
If you feel very strongly about something and want to weigh in it’s best to use your personal social media accounts for that and do it in a professional non insulting way. If you can leave your business out of the controversial topics you will be far better of in the long run.
#12 – Trying Too Hard with Trends
Social trends can be a great way for businesses to make themselves relatable to an audience, and the content with which they pull this off can easily go viral. The Denny’s Twitter account is a perfect example of a social media account that knows how to use current events and trends to place timely Tweets.
However, they’re one of the lucky ones. You probably can’t find the same success ripping memes from Tumblr and posting irreverent, incomprehensible text.
The lesson to learn is that just because you see something is popular doesn’t mean you need to attach your business brand to it. Sometimes a hashtag lends itself to your already established message or strategy, and that’s when it’s your time to shine. At the same time, when you misuse or misunderstand a trend or hashtag, your followers won’t be laughing with you – they’ll be laughing at you before they unsubscribe.
In a more extreme example, DiGiorno pizza once misappropriated a hashtag about surviving domestic violence for advertising their products. You definitely don’t want yourself to wind up in that position.
#13 – Not Acknowledging Feedback
It’s easy to make a mistake on social media. Go back to the above mistake like DiGiorno and put yourself in their shoes. You look at the trending hashtags, see one that you think you can use for your brand and tweet something you think is clever. In reality, you’ve just been unimaginably insensitive.
When you do mess up, social media users won’t hesitate to tell you so, and this isn’t something to chalk up to “haters” giving you a hard time. Sometimes you’ll come across some vulgar, verbally violent social media users who exist just to be nasty, but more often than not the feedback you get on social media will be something you want to pay attention to.
When you receive criticism from someone on social media, acknowledge it, either through conversation or changing what was addressed. Don’t fight, don’t get nasty – take it graciously and change if necessary.
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These 13 Fatal Social Media mistakes, well not really “Fatal” but can certainly damage your brand and social media presence, are just some of the main things that you want to watch out for. If you can avoid these mistakes and use the tips suggested to fix them you will be on your way to a much better social media experience for you and all your followers.
It can still be difficult for businesses to get the hang of social media but if you keep experimenting to see what works well for your brand and what doesn’t, and keep track of both, you will be in a much better position that most. Please let me know what mistakes that you have made and want others to be aware of. I would love to hear your thoughts. And as always, if you need help or have specific questions about Social Media or digital marketing in general please feel free to reach out here with any questions.
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