Today, I will be talking to you about things that you should avoid in social media marketing to reach your goals and move forward.
Social media marketing is hard, and unless you are a total expert, it’s likely that you will not be good at everything that this profession demands. Maybe you will excel in photography or be an expert in content creation, and just about comfortable with everything else, and that is fine.
There will be mistakes and certain bumps in your road to reach your goals, which is normal. However, you need to understand that you can minimize these bumps by avoiding certain things while practising social media marketing.
So you may ask what I should avoid in social media marketing to excel in this game. To begin with, let us first consider the following statistic.
In 2019, the number of global social media users is estimated to be around 2.77 billion. (Source: Statista)
Keeping the above fact in mind, it can be safely concluded that 2019 will be a booming year for digital media. The increased number of social media users will mean an indefinite effort from the social media marketers’ part to handle the various social media platforms, with their ever-changing algorithms and latest updates, which involve more business. Therefore, it is safe to say that this is the time to be a part of this continually evolving industry.
Social media is the best way to say “Look at me” without saying “Look at me”.
Brands are now spending a tremendous amount of time and money on social media marketing for increased brand awareness, lead generations, improving brand loyalty, and for more inbound traffic. With a robust strategy, you can create a successful marketing campaign.
However, it is also necessary that you avoid certain aspects while implementing social media marketing. We list down top 10 things you should avoid in social media marketing.
Ignoring the data
Be it any field or business, today’s world revolves majorly around data. The correct information is exceptionally crucial for your business as it helps you to understand the behaviour of your audience and at the same time, gives you a brief outlook on your campaign. Therefore, avoiding data is not preferable to any marketer.
Social media marketing has become more comfortable with analytics and now provides data that can help you track your progress on each platform. The ‘insights’ section on Facebook and the ‘analytics’ section on Twitter offer statistics that give you a fair idea of how your page and your posts are performing. Various third-party tools such as Sprout Social and Buzzsumo are also available in the market, with the help of which you can measure your social performance.
Dealing with negative feedback
Negative feedbacks can be scary for both, brands and individuals. Therefore, we often find ourselves either avoiding it or coming up with lame excuses for the said feedback. However, this type of behaviour can be a real blunder for a social media marketing professional.
Instead, no matter how painful, we can take negative feedback as an opportunity to improve ourselves and address it with particular concerns. In other words, we can say that harmful feedbacks act as an honest opinion of your customers and therefore, should never be taken lightly.
The correct way to approach this situation is to respond to negative feedback at the earliest. Effective online reputation management can help a brand garner increased brand loyalty from its customers. Creating a special team to address such concerns is also recommended.
Posting content that does not drive engagement
“There is no more B2B or B2C. It’s H2H: Human to Human.” – Bryan Kramer
Engaging with your audience regularly on a social media platform is a tough but well-rewarded task. However, sharing low-value content solely for the sake of posting on social media every day will drive zero engagement.
It is true that if you post regularly, you will get attention from your audience. However, it is also true that this is not enough to ensure high engagement levels. It is essential that you build a trusting relationship with your audience through great content. Creating content that is relatable and interesting, and with a call-to-action will initiate the spark that is needed for social media marketing.
Too much of you all-over
According to Adweek, a survey concluded that 46% respondents’ unfollowed brands for posting too many promotional messages, 41% unfollowed because of irrelevant information and almost 35% unfollowed brands that tweeted too much.
Thus, it is safe to say that promoting yourself or your brand too much is overbearing and may lower your rate of audience engagement. Similarly, promotions and ads should be chosen carefully, basis your audience and included subtly in your social media feed.
For example, as a fitness blogger, collaborating with and posting about a beauty brand may lead to a decline in their following, just because the audience, which includes fitness slang, who follow the blogger will not relate to the beauty brand and will thus find this content irrelevant.
Your social presence is not a mere expansion of your business but a platform through which you can build a trust-filled relationship with your audience. Exploiting this trust will lead you to a decline in digital popularity.
Ignoring social listening
Social listening is essential in today’s time when you always have to stay updated with your audience’s opinions on and reviews of your brand. When you engage with your audience through posts of others, you, in a way, tend to create a path for your content to be marketed.
You have got to be an excellent listener to maintain your brand’s unique social media presence. Social listening is also the critical factor in generating engaging content on social media.
You can take the help of tools such as Google Alerts, useful for individual web alerts, and Radian6, which is a professional, sophisticated social media monitoring tool; both of which are available online for social listening.
The correct use of #hashtags
Often, we find ourselves confused about what the proper usage of hashtags should be for our social media marketing campaigns. However, the best tip ever shared is not to make your content overcrowded with hashtags.
Yes, we agree that it is effortlessly easy to get carried away while implementing hashtags in our content. However, the trick is to try and minimise the hashtag usage to a level that resonates well with your content.
For marketing purposes, if you are trying to create a unique, branded hashtag, then do keep it short and sweet.
For more guidance on the usage of hashtags keep reading how to use hashtags.
Failing to create a robust strategy
You need to understand your business niche, audience and products in detail before creating a social media marketing strategy, as this will help you build a robust digital presence. Ensure that you have clarity on the following factors before making your brand strategy:
Your Goal
Sufficient time needed
Capable team
Target audience
Stay steady while taking the initial steps to reap fruitful endeavours.
Diversify your content
Posting a similar style of material all the time can create a social media feed that will bore your audience quickly and make them unfollow you. Posting different forms of content, though with the same underlying tone, can increase your audience engagement rate. You can opt for sharing blogs, videos, GIFs, retweets or reposts from inspiring people from your field, promotional links, etc.
On Instagram, we often see many bloggers that follow a specific colour theme for their feed, such as black and white, retro, etc. However, their content is always unique and exciting, including a healthy mix of food, travel, selfies and lifestyle. Their feed also includes videos, Boomerangs and large nine image grids.
Staying unique but within a theme that your audience is used to seeing will guarantee your brand digital fame.
Measuring the wrong metrics
When measuring the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for social media marketing, brands fail to notice the correct parameters and tap them correctly. Few believe that estimating the number of followers on Facebook or Twitter is their ROI whereas some thinkx` that calculating the engagement levels bring forward an accurate ROI. Few brands also consider conversions and lead generations as their ROI calculating tool.
All the metrics discussed above vary for all the social media platforms and therefore, need to be assessed correctly.
Not being transparent enough
You can only win the trust of your followers on social media by being transparent. Personally responding to your customers on social media, answering their queries and solving their grievances will help you to create a positive impact on social media platforms.
If you are new to social media marketing, you are bound to make mistakes. Don’t be disheartened if your first campaign went wrong.
Hope this was helpful. Keep following us for more such articles.
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