Common Social Media Marketing Mistakes To Avoid

If your business isn’t already using social media to promote its products and brand, you’re missing out on one of the best marketing sources currently available. However, don’t rush to create a business page on every site that exists just yet. You need to go into this with a strategy that’ll ensure your campaign is as strong as it can be.

Diving in without any direction can end up not making a difference in your overall sales or, even worse, actively hurt them. That’s why you need to be aware of the most common social media marketing mistakes that other companies have made in the past. That way, you can avoid them and find more success.

Relying Heavily on Automation

One thing that has changed the game for social media marketing is automation. From posting updates based on a set schedule to generating generic posts for your feed without your involvement, automated systems can run most of your campaign for you. However, that doesn’t mean you should let them.

When first starting, you really need to learn how social media marketing works. You shouldn’t trust an AI to do it all for you. Once you have a general understanding and have built a decent following, you can start implementing automation in bits and pieces. Still, you should never fully automate everything. Most people can tell when programs have written a post. Also, AI isn’t perfect, so it could accidentally say something that goes against your company’s core values.

Posting Too Little or Too Often

Whether you decide to automate your posting process or not, one thing to be aware of is your frequency of updates. The key to being successful on social media is engagement. If there aren’t any posts on your company’s page for people to interact with, they won’t be there long enough to drive engagement. That means you need to keep up with your posts and remain consistent.

One thing to note, though, is that too many posts can also be a bad thing. If there’s a wealth of updates on your page, they might overwhelm newcomers, which can send them elsewhere. On top of that, even if you have regular visitors who like engaging with you, overposting can feel like you’re metaphorically shoving your products down their throats.

Instead, you’ll need to find a happy medium. The best way to determine what’s best for your audience is to test various posting frequencies. However, you can look to other successful social media marketing campaigns for inspiration as well.

Failing To Respond to People

Simply posting updates isn’t going to cut it as far as engagement goes, though. You also need to respond to people who are trying to talk to you on these social media sites. If you don’t, your followers will feel like they’re talking to a brick wall, which will simply cause them to leave.

To ensure this doesn’t happen, respond to comments, mentions, and direct messages you receive. Now, that doesn’t mean you need to reply to every single person who reaches out to you, especially if your page has reached high levels of engagement. Still, you should prioritize sending out responses, especially when it comes to direct messages. Many of those tend to be about more serious topics.

Using the Wrong Platforms

Believe it or not, not all social media platforms will be worth your time. Another common social media marketing mistake that too many companies make is trying to have a presence on all the popular ones. This just isn’t feasible, so you should avoid it. You’ll spend way too much time trying to update every single one, and many of them won’t even have the groups you’re trying to target on them.

Instead, it’s best to take the time to learn how to choose the best social media platform for your business before creating online profiles. This will save you lots of time and resources, which will give you better results in the long run.

Posting the Same Stuff to Each Platform

If you decide that using multiple social media platforms is the best option for your company, you need to make sure you don’t simply post the same material to each site. Not all platforms are equal, which means the same content won’t perform as well as it might somewhere else.

On top of that, some forms of content simply don’t translate between platforms. For example, Twitter focuses on short text-based posts, while YouTube is all about long-form video posts. You can’t easily convert the content from one to the other in this context without losing what the original post set out to do.

That’s why you need multiple teams that can create content that’s specific to the platforms your company is on. This is also why we recommend starting small with your social media efforts. Going too big too fast can lead to your business spreading its resources thin, leading to mediocre performance on all platforms.