5 Common Mistakes in Social Media Marketing
Social media provides an effective way for businesses to engage with customers and showcase their brands. If your potential customers are on social media, then you can bet your competitors are as well. The social platforms have raised the bar in terms of photographic resolution. Expectations for compelling, visually stunning images and video are high.
Businesses realize that social media marketing needs to be integrated into their marketing mix. However, a lack of understanding of social media marketing can drag down your efforts and produce lackluster results.
Here are 5 common mistakes that businesses make with their social media marketing:
1. Posting the identical content across all platforms
The audiences and rules of engagement are different from platform to platform. For instance, LinkedIn is for business professionals. Content is business related. TicTok is very different. It is a consumer platform for video content, with a much younger demographic. Using a social media content management platform like Hootsuite can be counterproductive if your expectation is to create one post and share it across all social platforms. You need to tailor your content for your audience, and for each of the social platforms on which your customers frequent.
2. Unremarkable content
As I mentioned, the bar is high these days in terms of photographic and video content. Today’s smartphones are capable of 4K photos and videos. When I see a post on Monday morning with a stock photograph of a coffee mug, I cringe. Planning is the key here. Understand the event you are sharing, or point you wish to make, and make the effort to compose the best possible image to attract eyeballs to your content.
3. Target audience is unclear or inconsistent
This is sometimes a symptom related to lack of brand strategy. If each post is directed at a different target audience, and the content is inconsistent, then it becomes more difficult to grow your followers and communicate a cohesive brand promise. I see this with tech industry companies that have one post aimed at customers, the next aimed at investors, and the next at fellow techies that will appreciate how cool their product is, and the next being a random “it’s national bring your dog to work day” post. The inconsistency does not help them grow their brand reach.
4. Lack of strategy
Further to the previous point, social media marketing can be effective at growing your brand reach and at attracting buyers, as long as there is a strategy. Without a strategy, the brand identity will lack definition, and the ability to drive sales will be impacted. If you aim to position your company as a thought leader, or a problem solver, or a creator of extraordinary customer experiences, your social media marketing plan needs to build-out a tree of content that tells that story effectively. Calendarize your social media content plan, and build that content a month or two in advance. This way you will maintain the posting frequency and produce the content topics that add a new element or proof-point to your brand story.
5. The hard sell
The unspoken rule of social media marketing is to share great content, and allow your followers to engage with your business or your brand on their terms. You want your customers to share their experiences with their like-minded friends and colleagues, and through word of mouth marketing, help drive more business to your company. The hard sell rarely works because it is all about closing a financial transaction, and not about the social dynamic of sharing an experience. The hard sell doesn’t work.
