11 Sep Social Media Mistakes to Avoid

Social media is a powerful tool. Every organization, big and small, can take advantage of social media’s great potential for establishing your brand, connecting with your customers and increasing your conversion rates. Social media is what your business or organization needs to be using to establish yourself in the online market. However, there is more to social media marketing than simply creating a social media account. Social media marketing is only effective when done right, and it’s not always easy. Whether you’ve been struggling to see positive results from your social media efforts or are just starting with social media for the first time, it’s vital to know the social media mistakes to avoid.

Today in our blog, we’re taking a look at what you need to avoid with your social media strategy — including posting without a purpose, too much automation and not measuring your success.

Posting Without a Purpose

Using social media without a plan or purpose will not bring you any returns, resulting in lost time and a poor ROI. Instead, it’s important to start your social media marketing efforts with a strategy and clear goals in mind. You need to decide what types of content you will be posting, who your target audience is, and how you anticipate your audience will receive your content. Just being present on social media won’t guarantee success.

Every move you make on your social media platforms must be done with a purpose. Even with goals and objectives in place, having poorly defined ones can be just as detrimental. You can’t track your success if you don’t have pre-set objectives to compare results against. These goals need to be clear and realistic — and will also connect to your overall business objectives. This is why posting without a purpose is one of the biggest social media mistakes you’ll need to avoid.

SMART goals are a goal-setting method popular in business, and they are just as useful for developing a social media strategy. SMART goals should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-sensitive.

• Specific goals have clearly outlined details that all team members can understand.
• Measurable goals make sure to incorporate metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) to track your success.
• Achievable goals are centered in the present based on time and resources.
• Realistic goals are grounded and reference the successful strategies of similar brands of your size and industry.
• Time-sensitive goals have a deadline. Even if they are not accomplished by the deadline, this will help you better understand and further develop how your social media strategy is working.

 

Don’t be afraid to compare and learn from the social media strategies of others when it comes to developing your own. Setting clear goals that your business can achieve through social media will give your strategy a purpose, and tracking your performance metrics will make sure your social media efforts stay on target. Remember, also, that developing a successful strategy takes time and continual reevaluation of your goals.

Setting and Forgetting

You can save time and help keep your social media presence consistent with social media automation tools. Social media automation can come in many different forms, including social media scheduling platforms and “bots” that can automatically like content, follow other users, make comments and send messages. 

Yes, social media automation can bring benefits in terms of increased revenue and conversions, saved time and money, and improved marketing performance. Yet at the same time, social media automation has some big downsides. These negatives include:

• It gives a negative brand image. — Automation when it comes to likes, comments, messages, follows and sometimes even posting can make your business appear to be nothing more than a spam bot to your audience. This can affect what’s known as your brand equity, which is the impact of sales and profits based on how your customers value your brand.
• People don’t like it. — People use social media to be social, not to interact with lifeless brands and bots. Content and engagement that appears unauthentic and automated will turn potential customers away. When using automation for posting content, make sure the post feels like a real person created it, and don’t post excessively.
• Automation restrictions are increasing. — While some automation is allowed by social media platforms, especially when it comes to automated posting, other types of automation are starting to be banned. Instagram is one of the toughest platforms on automation and bots as an effort to cut down on spam. Using these there can instantly suspend your account, and other social media networks are not far behind.
  
• It’s not completely effortless. — Social media automations can save you time, but you also have to put the effort into getting your automations into place. This is particularly true for creating your social media content. It’s important to still authentically engage with your audience on social media and to be hands-on with your social media management.

 

Social media is made up of constantly evolving spaces and opportunities. Setting and forgetting about your social media when it comes to automation will make your business fall behind when it comes to generating an engaged audience, improving your brand reputation and reaching those SMART goals.

Not Measuring Your Success

Connecting back to your SMART goals again, we can’t stress enough how important it is to be measuring your social media performance. Generating regular social media reports from within your social media platforms or through third-party social media management tools will help you see the big picture of how your content and overall social media strategy is performing online. You’ll need to do more than just track your metrics, however. You need to know what they actually mean and how they fit into your overall goals. Otherwise, you won’t be able to strategically improve on your success!

For example, you can focus on growing your follower count, but are those followers engaging with your content and becoming customers? If not, then maybe follower count isn’t the metric that should take priority. You might want to focus on the quality of your followers over the quantity, in this case. On the other hand, if you are seeing an increase in engagement and customers along with your follower count, then it might do well to compare your follower count to your website traffic and sales data. A direct correlation could be a good sign that your social media strategy is on track.

Other important social media metrics to measure include impressions, reach, engagement rate, likes, comments and link clicks. How you value and interpret each one will depend on the goals of your business and your social media strategy!

Social Media Done Right

Social media marketing and strategy development is no easy task. It’s an ongoing process that requires a deep understanding of the ever-changing social media landscape and the resources needed to achieve success. Effectively managing your business and your social media presence at the same time is difficult. Our social media marketing experts from Virtual Stacks Systems UK can make it easy! We will work with you on an ongoing basis to develop and implement a social media strategy that will meet your clear goals and grow your presence online. Contact us today to get started with social media and our other professional digital marketing services!