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Amol Ghemud Published: August 14, 2018
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Being a business- owner, you must have jumped on the bandwagon and placed your brand in the virtual space, yet you wonder why is it that your ROI isn’t that impressive. Statistics show 196 million social network users in India in 2017 and the number is estimated to increase to about 370 million in the next five years.
Naturally, you wouldn’t want to miss making your business presence felt in digital platforms and risk losing out on a lot of young-age customers. So, why is it that you still have doubts about promoting your business on social media? Here’s why—you are probably making some of the most common social media mistakes.
Entrepreneurs often fail at social media marketing and do not get the desired results from their campaigns. The basic need for social media marketing is to spread brand awareness and to increase the potential customer base. However, more often than not, social media does not bring out more leads being converted into sales opportunities. The results aren’t quantifiable, and the returns fail to be measured.
Want to set a successful social media strategy and avoid making mistakes?
Here is a list of 10 common social media marketing mistakes and how best to avoid them.
1. Poor Planning
You open up a Facebook page for your company, and you ride in the wave of the hoopla created around your brand name as people start to follow your page. You feel you have made your presence felt in the digital world by keeping up with today’s generation. Next thing you know people have stopped visiting the page after finding no new information, and not getting any replies to any of their queries.
The basic issue which most businesses face is that they open up their social media accounts without a proper marketing goal or strategy. An ineffective marketing plan can actually harm your business rather than grow it.
Consider this one such social media mistake example where entrepreneur Tina Henson from California, who runs an online marketplace for buying, selling or swapping retail gift cards, created a holiday marketing campaign on social media to boost up sales for her startup and the response was beyond her imagination.
Her site traffic went up 40 times more than usual, and her site crashed with her losing out on several thousands of people who visited her page.
What you should do to build the perfect strategy:
a) Have a measurable goal:
Figure out what you need out of your social media marketing plan— either increase sales, create brand awareness or gather many followers, etc.
b) Have a dedicated team:
Your pages on social media will not run by themselves, you need a dedicated team to regularly update posts, measure the page visits and replying to customer queries on a regular basis.
c) Be technically backed up:
Make sure your site is capable of handling traffic and also user-friendliness, you do not want to lose out on potential customers just because they couldn’t navigate to your site with ease.
2. Lack of Interaction
Ask yourself why you are on social media, is it only a sales pitch or a broadcast for your offers or do you really want to genuinely increase your customer base. Most businesses have no or minimal interaction with their followers.
How best to interact:
a) Try and engage your followers in a conversation
b) Build relationships with your potential customers
c) Make the tone of your posts friendly and not too corporate
What do you do when an angry customer lashes out at your social media page? Do you ignore and delete the comment so other followers wouldn’t see? When you are in a social space, you must be adaptable to receiving a lot of negative feedback.
3. Ignoring Feedbacks
Instead of ignoring or deleting such comments, take this as an opportunity in improving your communication skills ensuring the user in a friendly manner of a better product experience next time.
4. Getting into Controversies
A social media platform can easily set things to fire by making something go viral. Especially when social media users seem to love scandal and become far more vocal in protesting against something that they would have done in the physical world. You need to tread carefully on social media thin ice.
Make sure you do not use foul language or post offensive content. No political biases, racists remarks or content hurting religious sentiments. No matter what your actual site may contain, make sure you steer clear of controversies on social media.
Many a time we read about celebrity social media mistakes like how international pop star Madonna received angry responses for her posts on Twitter following the Orlando massacre.
5. Too much Visibility
What happens when you decide to open accounts on all possible social media platforms— Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr and a few more. While it’s good to be visible in the digital world, it is pointless to be on so many sites and then not be able to manage all of them efficiently.
Figure out what sort of customer base you need and target your audience wisely. If your company is a career consultancy, invest on marketing campaigns on sites such as LinkedIn. If you have a retail e-commerce site, promote yourself more with pictures and videos on Instagram.
6. Irrelevant or Uninteresting Content
Too much content or posts can reduce your number of followers. You simply cannot post content for the sake of some online activity on your page. The content needs to be relevant to your business and not go off topic to the extent of boring your readers.
One such social media marketing mistake was made by a company called Yogurtbay based in Mumbai. Their Facebook posts were so long that the actual message got lost.
7. Ignoring data
Looking at your social media page visits is one thing but not knowing what to do with those numbers is another. Having a measurable social media marketing campaign is extremely important.
You need to measure the correct KPIs. In today’s technologically advanced world there are multiple tools such as Google Analytics, Keyhole, and AgoraPulse that can help you analyse your data.
8. Not being transparent
If you feel you shouldn’t disclose too much information about your company on social media you might come out as too impersonal to users. By being transparent, you can engage more with your followers.
9. Too much promotion
Nobody likes too many advertisements and promotional announcements. If you keep on posting only sales circulars and discount offers or brand advertisements everywhere on social media, users might feel they are getting spammed. One example of such social media mistakes to avoid is seen on Godrej’s Twitter page where they keep posting too many links confusing the users.
10. No real followers
If you are only concerned about the number of followers on your page, you might just be on the wrong track. This means you have no ‘real’ followers, people who can actually be your potential customers. It is more important to have quality customers whom you can engage and build a relationship with to ensure you are part of their consumer journey.
So, instead of stressing over low returns on your social media investments, figure out the best plan that works and keep your followers updated!
Conclusion:
These are the major social media mistakes you should avoid. If you have done them in the past or seen anyone do them, that’s ok. But now you know the answers.
So take care that you avoid them in future. If you have any doubt regarding whether or not you are on the right track in your social media dealings. Feel free to get in touch with us. contact@upgrowth.in
Amol has helped catalyse business growth with his strategic & data-driven methodologies. With a decade of experience in the field of marketing, he has donned multiple hats, from channel optimization, data analytics and creative brand positioning to growth engineering and sales.
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