4 Common Social Media Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

Every business hopes to get their brand out in front of as many eyeballs as possible. And social media is a great way to do that. However, in an attempt to stand out in these crowded networks, it’s not unusual to make some mistakes.

If you’re looking to reap maximum benefits from social media marketing, here are some of the most common marketing mistakes that you should avoid.

1. Spamming Your Audience

Like any other successful marketing campaign, the main idea is to grow your brand and increase your client base. However, some business owners take this as an opportunity to just post about their business and share nothing else.

While this will still give you the exposure you may be looking for, the disadvantages outweigh its benefits. The bottom line is, people will stop following you if all you talk about is your business.

Tip: Keep your promotional activities to a minimum. Best-practice says follow a pattern of posting one promotional post for every four non-promotional posts.

Non-promotional updates can be reshares, an image or photo that shows your company culture, inspirational posts, how-to guides, infographics or blog pieces. Try to share something that brings value to your audience.

2. Inconsistent Posting

When customers are developing their impression of you, they’re looking for signs of credibility, reputation and trust.

Active social media accounts show your customers that you’re a legitimate business they can trust. When users see photos of the people behind the business, or comments from existing customers, it lets them know they’re not taking a risk engaging with your brand.

Inactivity can have the opposite result. If your brand exists on social platforms, but you rarely or never post, it gives the impression that no one is actively engaged in your company, and potential customers may pass on giving you their business.

Tip: To avoid making this mistake, you should have an excellent strategy to guide your times of posting. Don’t have the time? Then hire someone to do it for you. (Have you checked out our social media posting service?)

Not posting for a single day can affect your impressions and engagement rates, damaging your social media marketing efforts. And not being regular with your updates means your content can get hidden from most of your followers by the social platform algorithms.

3. Failing to Engage in Conversations

It doesn’t matter how many updates you add to your social media channels if you’re not social on them.

Increased engagement is a common social media marketing KPI. However, if you do not engage with users’ comments on your feed, it leaves the impression that you’re just not interested in engaging in conversation with your community.

Tip: When someone replies to your post, make sure you respond – and as soon as possible. The more you respond (like or comment back) the more your customers will want to engage.

Each comment on your business page is an opportunity to increase engagement and invite more users to participate. And when you are actively participating, you can expect follower growth and a higher engagement rate.

4. Boring Content

You can post relevant content and still be entertaining. Social media isn’t only a mode of communication, but also a source of entertainment for many people.

Therefore, being too serious all the time in your posts may be informative, but that can eventually become pretty boring for the audience.

Tip: Share inspirational posts, humor and and videos that you find relevant, in good taste and entertaining.

Remember, there’s a lot of competition in every field, and yours is no exception. As such, consumers have various alternatives, whenever they feel that your page is dull and less engaging.

The Takeaway

There’s no one thing that you need to do to make your social media efforts top notch. It’s about taking care of each aspect and aligning your goals and processes to ensure that you do the basics well and build on that.

Social media done the right way has enormous potential to build your brand community, grow your customer base and skyrocket ROI. But all your efforts can be undone if you’re still making social media marketing mistakes.