9 Social Media Marketing Mistakes that Brands often Commit

Marketing your business, services or products on social media doesn’t necessarily have to be hard or expensive. In fact, with a little creativity, you can gain people's interest, which can lead to higher brand recognition and sales.

While a lot of business owners incorporate social media marketing efforts almost successfully, there are some rookie social media marketing mistakes they often commit - marketing mistakes that are easily avoidable!

Let me share with you 9 common social media marketing mistakes you need to avoid at all costs to avoid falling into the same traps.

9 most common social media marketing mistakes to avoid:

Our newly-launched 60-minutes Webinar on the topic - 9 Social Media Marketing Mistakes To Avoid And What To Do Instead, is available on YouTube now! This blog is focused on highlighting the points that we discussed during the webinar. Read on to find out.

Here are some common mistakes in social media marketing that keep you from realizing your full social media potential:

1. Too much self-promotion on social media
2. Not tracking the social media analytics
3. Not having a dedicated social media marketing team
4. Shouting louder on social media to get attention
5. Not listening to what your audience is saying
6. Not using multiple forms of content
7. Not having any or enough CTAs
8. Not having a social media marketing strategy
9. Relying too much on automation

Here's the recording to the webinar as well as the slides of the webinar

1. Promoting yourself a lot and spamming your audience

The number one marketing mistake that you can commit is - Too Much Self Promotion! Now that every company is utilizing social media for their business, the issue of spamming and bragging has become more prominent than ever. Abstain from posting automatic links and avoid spamming your audience otherwise you'll lose your followers and engagement.

So how do you avoid spamming your target audience? How do you ensure being subtle while promoting on social media?

Be subtle yet powerful - Use the 'wing-man solution,' i.e., "find other people to sing your praises." Social media is all about socializing and communicating with people! Thus, consider engaging in conversations rather than sounding salesy. If you can engage people effectively on social media, you can easily make them sing your praises!

This technique works for Airbnb! They do not promote their services in a way that annoy their audience - they do not brag about themselves, they share the experiences! Their subtle stories provide the answers to all the questions people have related to their services - who are the people I will be staying with, and what will the experience be like?

2. Not tracking the social media analytics

Alright, let’s get one thing clear from the outset; Without actionable insights, there is no point in using social media marketing for business!

There is a significant amount of information hiding behind all your social media activities. And not measuring that information is a big and common marketing mistake that could keep you away from gaining success on social media.

Just like you measure the success of your email marketing campaigns, so should you track your social media analytics. This remarkable data can benefit your social media marketing in such a large number of ways. Benefits of using social media analytics are:

• Better comprehend your audience and create content accordingly
• Know which social networks are best for you
• Understand your competitors
• Build a better marketing strategy

So, how do you effectively track your social media analytics?

I'd suggest you to utilize Google Analytics to track the shares and analyze the traffic that comes to your site.

Determine your social KPIs, target demographics, and engagement factors to let your analytics software efficiently extract the information that is useful for your campaign.

Begin with observing engagement, customer conversion, and patterns in buying decisions. It is crucial for you to analyze the following:

• How people react to your posts and is there any improvement in engagement?
• How do your clients feel when they interact with you or your products?
  Are they happy?
• Is your campaign more inclined towards a specific demographic segment? On certain networks, it should be. For example, if you sell women’s products, use Pinterest for brand promotion as more than 80% of users on Pinterest are female.

Analyzing purchases made by customers can enable brands to apprehend key marketing insights. For example, TrueConversion’s research shows the following insights:

Such noteworthy bits of knowledge can help your brand cultivate relationships with the customers. If you haven’t been doing it yet, begin gathering and unscrambling your analytics and social media KPIs to facilitate your social media marketing endeavors.

3. Not having a social media team

It's hard for everyone to be good at everything at all times! You just cannot expect everything from a single person - sometimes you need to have specific people for specific tasks.

Why not hire a team that takes up all the additional responsibilities and give you true serenity?

That's exactly what a dedicated social media marketing team does. They work closely with your company and make your objectives as their own. They guarantee timely completion of the tasks and whenever required, even offer help and maintenance after completion of the projects. Consider including an analyst, a product expert, a communicator and a coordinator (to help the complete team) in your dedicated marketing team. They are the most appropriate people to handle all the positive as well as the negative issues that arise.

For instance, rather than attempting to spread yourself crosswise over all the social media platforms – and not performing admirably at all of them – take a stab at concentrating on only a couple of them. If you have a marketing team, they can divide the work and take care of marketing on multiple platforms and could further boost the engagement on your social media posts. Also, keep track of your teams' performance using social media management tools like Statusbrew.

4. Shouting louder on social media

I understand it can be tough to catch people's attention on social media platforms like - Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter as there is a considerable number of people already present on these platforms and there are chances that your social media posts are going to get lost in the massive flood of updates.

Simply shouting louder on these platforms is not necessarily going to help you grab attention and drive engagement on your posts (By shouting louder we mean - posting multiple times in the short period and using capital letters extensively).

Yelling on social media is going to leave your friends and followers annoyed, and they could eventually stop following you. Instead, be consistent and persistent with strong content. Keep producing high-quality content – people will finally notice it.

For instance, in the first screenshot, the Twitter handle @IAm_DjLee tweets multiple times a day, but he has no engagement. While Content is the King in Peter’s case cause he’s a persistent content creator and his content is relatable and appeals to the masses.

5. Not listening to your audience

One of the other social media mistakes that people often commit is that they keep sharing their information without listening to what their audience is saying - it is social suicide.

Talking without listening isn’t communication

Communication is a two-way street! To get the desired ROI and exposure, to make people pay attention too what you say about your brand or services start listening and responding to what your audience is saying. I can't stress this enough that you can't afford not to know what is of interest to your audience and what are their pain points.

For instance, if you are an email marketing company, posting about PPC is not going to help you draw the right kind of traffic.

Not every type of content is going to be suitable for you-you have to understand what your audience wants by listening to their conversations. This is where the use of social media management tools come in. Using Social Media Management Tools like Statusbrew you can listen to your audience and can further understand your customer’s interests and the content that appeals to them.

6. Not using multiple forms of content

Does your blog post resemble a page of a boring history book? Does your blog has zero images?

Big blocks of text with no graphics separating it makes your piece of content monotonous. Text alone isn't engaging enough!

If you want your content-marketing pieces to be top-ranking, incorporate text, images as well as videos in them. People watch more than 100 million hours of videos on platforms like Facebook. Also, people adore infographics - 41.5% of marketers experience more engagement on infographics as compared to the other form of content.

Following is the image showing what type of visual format performed best and drove maximum engagement:

But what can be the reason for such high consumption of graphical content?

People love graphical content as it is easier to digest than reading the text alone. Thus, rather than sticking to the plain text, try switching up your content delivery method to images and videos.

7. Not having any or enough CTAs

The call to action is a crucial ingredient to any effective marketing program. CTAs are so compelling, so important and so foundational to the success of any online marketing initiative that if you are missing on them, you are doing your business a damage!

Conversions, revenue, business, and profit — they all rely upon the CTAs. Thus, it has become necessary to craft effective CTAs to draw visitors’ attention, pique their interest and directly impact your conversion rates.

To get your CTAs right, here's a checklist that you need to follow:

• Create a highly contrasting attention-grabbing design for CTAs
• Create actionable copy by using words like “download,” “register” or “start.”
• Create a sense of urgency - use words like a limited offer, few items left, etc
• Create informative CTAs and ensure the copy explicitly tells your customers what they should expect in exchange for their click

Neil Patel's website is a perfect example of a site with enough CTAs.

8. Not having a social media marketing strategy

Having an effective social media marketing strategy acts as a roadmap that guides you in almost every business decision that you make. And if in case you fail to recognize the importance of a marketing strategy, then you are missing out on something serious. People make mistakes! But that doesn't mean even you commit them. If you keep on committing the mistakes and don't have a proper plan of action, it will lead to the following consequences:

• It might lead to losing out to the competitors
• You may confront the issue in gaining and retaining customers
• You might be missing out on opportunities for better targeting and optimization
• Lack of planning often leads to bad execution and competitors may take advantage of this.

Remember, knowledge is power, and until you have enough awareness about the importance of having a proper marketing strategy, you will always fail at coming up with an effective plan for your business.

Social media marketing strategy must be approached in the same way you approach the planning for any other marketing plans. Have specific goals, budgets and a concrete plan of action that outlines what you are endeavoring to achieve, how you will accomplish it, how you will measure results, and what resources you will need to allocate.

Social media often influence the purchasing decisions of people. And, lack of strategy hands the advantage to competitors

9. Relying too much on automation

One of the most common mistakes in social media marketing that companies make is relying too much on automation - automatic posting to their social media accounts. Social media is unquestionably not about all this. People utilize social media because they want to interact with other people and not with those robotic messages. If in case people don't feel associated with your posts, if they feel the exchange of messages is impersonal, they will distance themselves from your brand. In extreme cases, if you spam them with too much irrelevant automatic content, you will begin losing them.

Be mindful so as not to estrange your audience by posting content automatically and rather consider approaches to amuse, engage and inspire by posting content that is customized and authentic.

Wrapping Up!

It is crucial for you to address all the social media marketing mistakes at earliest to be more effective because these mistakes hold you back. Keep in mind that customers are in control now, so make proper adjustments to provide them with adequate chances to settle on choices and enjoy the benefits!

The buzzword for the day is VALUE! Thus, if you can provide your customers with value, they will stick with you, and you’ll eventually drive a lot more sales.

Now, over to you: what are the social media marketing mistakes that you usually commit? Share with us in the comments below.