Social media marketing is not always easy. There are many ways to simply get it wrong without even realising it. You have probably seen many social media campaign fails in the last decade, whether it was on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook. Even though mistakes can happen to everyone, their consequences can severely impact your business’ online presence or at least simply make it more difficult for you to generate sales.
Today we will go through some of the most common social media fails and show you how to avoid them.
1. Bragging
Excessive self-promotion is an instant turnoff. Nearly half of your followers are likely to unfollow you you if you don’t get the balance right. Make sure that you do not talk too much about how great your company is. As much as promoting your products is important, help your customers see what else you can offer them. Whether you want to write content for your blog, share tips or comment on industry trends, posting about something other than your products’ excellence is more than important.
2. Being anti-social
There is a fair share of introverts in this world. However, your business should always focus on the ‘social’ aspect of social media. Share, retweet, post regularly and talk to your customers. Additionally, you should never ignore their suggestions and questions. If there is a particular matter your customers inquire about or would like to see on your social media, make sure their wishes are acknowledge. Ignoring and avoiding contact with your followers will make you come across as cold and inaccessible.
3. Not taking social media seriously
Even though you might have not had social media from the early days of opening your business, social media should not be treated as a mere addition to your establishment. Among many things, social media activity can lead to significant increase in conversions for your business, gaining new customers and increasing your brand visibility.
4. Inconsistency
Posting on social media ‘when you feel like it’ and changing your tone and style of social activity is not going to win you new customers and sales. Even though different social media platforms require specific content adjustments, your overall message and frequency of posting should be consistent and planned out.
5. Not measuring data
Measuring your social media metrics is a crucial part of an effective social media strategy. If you do not measure your data, you will never know whether what you are doing is working. Regardless of what your goals are, you need to track your statistics to see if you are actually achieving them.
6. Forgetting that we are all human
Being a business owner indisputably requires a certain level of professionalism. However, both you and your customers are also people. Don’t be afraid to share reasonable jokes or funny pictures from time to time. Keeping it real will most likely help you gain new followers and strengthen the bond between you and your audience.
7. Being oblivious to current events
Whilst planning your social media posts, you cannot ignore ongoing global events. You need to remain aware of current events to avoid coming across as insensitive. For example, if you do not acknowledge matters such as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic or ignore a tragic incident happening in your country or area, your customers might find you ignorant and class your content as distressful. However, there is a fine line between acknowledging current events and making political statements, which are never a good business move. In short, ensure that your posts remain sensible and acknowledge major situations that affect people around the world and in your area.
8. Being sloppy
Typos, grammatical errors and punctuation mistakes are not acceptable. Errors can make even best content look sloppy and unattractive. Customers do pick up on errors in text and often disregard the whole post as underwhelming. Make sure that you always proofread your posts prior to publishing. You can also ask your friends and colleagues for help or use programs such as Grammarly that will check your post for you.
9. Providing useless content
This one might seem harsh but it emphasises how important quality content is. You need to provide your audience with unique, interesting content that they cannot find elsewhere. Among millions of social media business accounts, you need to think how to make your worth following. Emphasising your brand identity, unique products and services as well as providing an expertly crafted content will help your business stand out.
10. Repeating yourself
Re-purposing your content for different reasons is good. However, repeatedly reusing the same content is not. Do not reshare and repost the same content over and over again. If you are promoting a line of products or want to reuse your previous blog content to further promote it, make sure that you still make some changes instead of repeating the same message in an identical format.
Social media fails – summary
As you can see, there is quite a number of things that can go wrong in social media marketing. However, knowing these risks already puts in you in a better position. Looking out for these aspects and be critical if your social media management approach will help you avoid social media fails and keep your business on top of your online presence.
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