If your social media marketing results are anything less than expected, it could be because of several reasons. Even the smallest of these factors could mean the difference between having a viral post or having a dead post. Both experienced and novice social media marketers are prone to committing these mistakes, by a momentary lapse of judgment.
Are you suffering the setbacks of these 5 social media marketing blunders? Let’s find out.
#1 Publishing too often or too infrequent
Your frequency of publishing matters more than you know. Publishing too often could annoy your followers while publishing too rarely could drastically reduce your reach. So, what’s the right publishing frequency? Well, that depends on your brand, industry, and size of social media following. Regardless, the best way to identify the ideal publishing frequency is by conducting experiments.
Use a social media scheduling tool such as DrumUp to schedule different frequencies over a 2-3 week period and see what works best for your brand.
#2 Being overly promotional
Too much of promotional content can be a huge turn-off on social media and elsewhere. If you don’t want to drive your followers away, you should ideally balance promotional content with neutral and non-promotional posts. While you do need to give your products and services some visibility, that shouldn’t be the only things you talk about.
If you can’t invest in creating non-promotional content, curate existing content – news, tips and ideas – using a content curator like Feedly. It’ll save you time and serve your purpose of sharing rich and diverse content.
#3 Isolating social media marketing
Social media is only one marketing channel. Many social media marketers make the mistake of isolating their social media campaigns from other marketing efforts. By doing this you not only curb your reach but also diminish the impact of your content on your target audience. By running campaigns on multiple marketing platforms, you can repeatedly make an impact on the same audience and stay top of mind.
One of the simplest ways to run your campaigns across multiple marketing platforms is to maintain a content calendar that has an overview of your activity. Google Calendar works very well for this purpose because it functions across devices.
#4 Measuring results by vanity metrics
Measuring your social media marketing results is critical because it can give you an estimate of performance and ROI. Without these numbers, it can be impossible for you to decide if you should stick to a certain strategy or revise it. However, when measuring metrics, it’s important to ensure that the numbers are actually representative of your social media strategies, and vanity metrics are usually misleading.
You can use social media analytics tools like Quintly to measure engagement metrics, but for conversions, you should use a combination of custom URLs and Google Analytics in addition to those tools.
#5 Neglecting negative feedback
When running a business in today’s world, it’s tough to control the conversation about you on social media. You’re bound to have feedback, and some of it is bound to be negative. But how you respond to that negative feedback matters. Some brands choose to ignore or delete their negative feedback, which is a terrible idea, because negative feedback is actually a boon in disguise.
You could use a social media monitoring tool like Brand24 to detect negative comments and respond to them in the most advantageous way possible. Some brands get a ton of visibility on social media because of the way they respond to negative feedback.
Wrap
Every brand wants to invest in social media because it’s supposed to be effective, but few brands experience its benefits in reality. However, with the right tools and social media strategies you can grow your business, provided that you’re not committing the mistakes mentioned on this post.