7 Social Media Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

Social media has the power to fuel exceptional growth in your business’s reach, lead, traffic and conversions. Plus, it can encourage exceptional brand exposure, visibility and awareness. However, social media marketing campaigns can be a ‘hit or miss’, and if not designed properly, they can actually negatively affect your brand’s reputation.

There are some critical mistakes you should always avoid when designing and implementing them if you aim to keep your brand in good standing with your customers. Here are the 7 most common SMM campaign mistakes to avoid making when developing your next strategy!

1. Failing to Create a Solid Marketing Strategy

Failing to develop a solid SMM strategy is a widespread mistake among modern businesses. If you don’t have a clear social media marketing strategy, your goals and key performance indicators are most likely not as clearly defined as you want them to be.

Not having a plan can mean that content doesn’t get posted regularly and doesn’t get assessed and updated either. Many companies who fail to plan their SMM strategies end up giving up on social media outright, as it doesn’t provide the engagement or results they were hoping for.

It’s essential to take the time to create a proper strategy for your social media marketing angle. Determine your goals for each platform, how you will reach them and which metrics you will track to measure and improve your results. You should have a unique strategy laid out for every social media platform you use, all of which should tie into your overall sales and marketing objectives.

Your strategies will need constant readjustment. Be sure to use data gathered from your assessment periods to make informed changes to your approach.

2. Lacking Personal Touch

There are very few people who will gravitate towards a robotic corporate brand. People are on social media to interact with other people. They will happily interact with their favourite brands too, but only if those brands add a personal and human touch to their interactions with their followers.

Don’t respond with copy-and-pasted corporate responses when followers reach out to you on social media or rely too heavily on automated posting schedules. Create unique, relevant content, and reply to followers with personal messages that directly address the person as an individual. Show them empathy and authenticity wherever possible. You should also resolve disputes and complaints diplomatically and proactively to gain the trust of your target audience.

3. Deleting Negative Feedback

You can’t please everyone all the time! At some stage, every online business will receive negative reviews. Some companies decide to ignore or perhaps even delete this poor feedback in the hopes that their customers won’t notice it and that their business won’t be affected negatively. Unfortunately, this approach can damage your brand’s reputation instead.

Take negative reviews as an opportunity to engage with your customers. Find out exactly what trouble they’re experiencing and offer professional and diplomatic solutions. Respond to these reviews with tact and empathy and be as transparent as possible with your customers and followers.

This approach may redeem you in the reviewer’s eyes and improve your chances of retaining that customer and others in the long term.

4. Ignoring Analytics

Analytics is essential to the success of your business. There’s little point in using social media marketing without gathering actionable insights into the results of your campaigns. You can gauge tactics such as Search Engine Optimisation and email advertising using analytics software to give you the data you need in order to develop more effective campaigns in the future.

In addition, it’s best if you use analytics software like Google Analytics to evaluate your brand’s social media performance metrics. This software can track the actions of your social media followers and visitors, analyse your web traffic and calculate the recognition and coverage of your posts to help you design even more effective approaches.

5. Not Engaging in Conversation

Simply promoting your products on social media is not enough to form a meaningful, lasting connection with your customers. You need to interact with them frequently to keep them interested in your brand. But not too often, as you will discover below.

Engaging with your customers and starting mutual conversations through your posts will allow you to foster long-term brand loyalty.

6. Failing to Refine Your Audience

You can’t target everyone with your products, regardless of how in-demand they may be. You need to know your precise target audience and appeal to them specifically to reach the right people with the right messages.

You should tailor your social media marketing campaigns to your specific target audience, their unique traits and interests and of course, their consumer behaviours. Once you have refined your audience, you can create the right content and adverts to engage them and build a customer base of people who are genuinely interested in what you have to offer.

7. Spamming

Every business wants people to see their marketing content. It stands to reason that the more you share your marketing messages on social media, the more people will notice and engage with them.

Unfortunately, spamming is a big and all-too-common mistake made by many social media marketing teams. Overloading followers with constant posts will annoy them, cause them to ignore your messages and potentially even prompt them to unfollow or block you.

The best way to avoid spamming your target audience is to research how your social media channels’ timelines work and how often you can post without irritating your followers. You can post multiple Tweets a day on Twitter, but try to stick to posting once or twice a day on Instagram and Facebook.

The Last Word On SMM Campaign Mistakes

When utilised correctly, social media is one of the most powerful digital marketing tools. That’s why it’s important to avoid making the common SMM campaign mistakes mentioned above. Instead, take the time to define your strategies, goals, target market and analytical plans clearly.

The improvements you will most likely see in your sales and engagement figures will be worthwhile.