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10 Social Media Mistakes Businesses Should Avoid

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The social media for business landscape has refashioned in the last few years, thanks to new technologies like Meta Business Tools, Facebook Marketplace, Instagram For Business, Instagram Shop, and more. Let’s put this into perspective: over 50 million small businesses are using Facebook Pages, and more than 200 million business profiles on Instagram. 

Brands are trying too hard to become the apple of people’s eyes amidst the ever-so-rising, highly competitive market. As businesses start to use social media for marketing their products and services, they make a few blunders in the process. If you are starting a new venture or business, avoid these social media mistakes to trounce your competitors. 

1 No Social Media Marketing Strategy In Place

First things first, not having an operational social media marketing plan can cost you dearly. Most businesses fail to create a social media marketing strategy when commencing their social marketing and regret it later. Your brand’s social presence will help you better understand your (prospective) customers’ behavior, needs and wants, likes and dislikes, interests, and pain points. You can use this data to devise your social media strategy specially catered to their needs. 

Start designing your social media strategy that includes 

  • the outline of your social media goals for each platform,
  • how you plan to achieve them,
  • the content you plan to post,
  • a clear delegation of tasks within the social media team, 
  • the metrics you will track to validate the success, and
  • how you will put the data back into the process for continuous improvement. 

2 Not Being Aware Of The Audience

Picture this: you create a social media strategy for all the social networks and are all set to kickstart your marketing. After a month, you still struggle to get the reach and engagement you expect. One possibility is you are targeting the wrong audience. Dodging the target audience awareness step will take you nowhere in your marketing efforts. Your social media strategy without the knowledge of the target audience would be a damp squib.

As your focus is to create content for your target audience, understand their demographics, sentiments, and behavioral patterns first. Enterprise social media tools can help you get insights into your audience’s perception of your brand and its demographics. 

3. Not Engaging With The Audience

Another common mistake businesses make in social media marketing is not engaging with their audience. Not only is engagement a ranking factor, but it also improves your brand’s reputation by resolving customer queries on public forums. Constantly engaging with your audience helps build trust and improves customer retention. 

Keep your customers and followers before anything, and interact with them often. However, be wise enough to know what comments to respond to and what to not. Not all the comments in your socials need your reply or attention. Comments sections these days are flooded with spam messages and harmful negative comments (some genuine, some fake). Handle these comments smartly, as they can make or break your brand reputation. 

4. Taking Spam and Negative Comments Lightly

Elaborating on the above statement, spam and negative comments can water down all your excellent work on social media. It’s crucial to handle them carefully. If you’re new to online business and social media marketing in particular, I can’t stress enough how important it is to manage bad reviews. 

An unsatisfied customer is bound to take it to a public forum like Instagram, Facebook, or Google Reviews to voice their disappointment and poor experience with a business. Although you can’t stop them from posting negative reviews, you can try out some tips to handle bad reviews professionally and maybe even convert them into positive ones. Keep in mind that not all negative reviews are helpful to your business. Some people post mean comments just for the sake of it. They are commonplace on Facebook and Google Maps. Hiding comments on Facebook is one way to deal with such scenarios and protect your brand reputation. 

5. Posting Schedule Is Inconsistent

Having no social media presence is far better than an inconsistent social media. A business with inconsistency in posting social media content passes one message to its customers: the company simply doesn’t care about its audience. The benefits of an active social media presence are known to everyone, but hardly you’ll find someone advising you on an inconsistent social schedule. 

You will lose your existing customers, leave alone attracting new ones with an account that posts once a month or so. When you start publishing content in well-planned schedules, it indicates you take your business seriously, and eventually, your followers will trust you. If you are the lone warrior in your business, things can go out of hand, given the number of daily business-critical tasks you have to execute. Even large enterprises that possess big teams struggle to post consistently. A professional social media automation tool can prove to be a savior. It can perform most mundane tasks that usually take hours for your team to complete, thus enhancing team productivity. A solid 76% of marketers cited automation tools for a positive ROI within a year of implementing them. Surely you don’t want to be left behind, do you?

6. Prioritizing Quantity Over Quality

How often do we hear about prioritizing quality over quantity? The same goes for social media. It’s not about the number of posts you publish in a day or a week but the outcome of those efforts. Remember, posting five high-quality posts that convert to ten customers in a week is better than publishing three posts daily with ten comments and no qualified leads. 

Depending on your market, audience behavior, and trends, drill down on the correct quantity of posts. A/B test the posting schedule and decide the right number of posts for different platforms. Shift your focus towards quality, and think about what value your posts provide to the audience. It will make your brand more trustworthy and well-received by the audience. 

7. Not Posting At The Right Time

Another blunder businesses make on social media is posting whenever the post is ready for publishing. If you desire good post engagement, posting at the right time will help you in your endeavor. While there are no guidelines on the right time to post, stats suggest the best time and days for maximum engagement on social media posts. 

A/B test the different posting schedules and determine which works best for you. Create a data-backed plan your social media team could follow to post at the right time across platforms. You only have a split second to grab your audience’s attention while they’re scrolling their feeds. Ensure you post when your audience is active and there’s less traffic. 

8. Not Tracking The Data

Lastly, track the data, even if you’re not big on numbers. Keep a close eye on the analytics to answer questions like:

What is the engagement on your posts?

How percent of site traffic is from Facebook or Instagram, or LinkedIn? 

How many conversions are through social channels?

What is the ROI for the social media marketing strategy?  

Not just these, there are several other questions data can answer. As an added benefit, it helps you make wiser decisions on where to put more effort, what channels to avoid, what drives the customers towards your brand, how they interact with your accounts and more. 

Avoid These Mistakes At Every Cost

Making these social media mistakes is a no-no. If you have made such errors earlier or are just starting your social media marketing, avoid them at any cost. Start by creating a social media strategy and know your audience inside out. Consistently post quality content at the best time for your accounts and engage with your audience. Don’t do away with the negative comments but handle them wisely. Above all, track the progress and feed the data into the improvement process. 

 

Kossi Adzo is the editor and author of Startup.info. He is software engineer. Innovation, Businesses and companies are his passion. He filled several patents in IT & Communication technologies. He manages the technical operations at Startup.info.

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