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13 Social Media Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

Hilary Smith

Last Updated on: April 6, 2023

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Social media is a simple way for your business to be well known. But understanding how it can effectively help your business will take some than just posting. Hence, you have to use it as a tool that can prevent or lessen these common social media marketing mistakes to avoid.

With the advent of Facebook in 2004, people have gotten used to sharing their life on social media. Twitter, Instagram scroll, or Snapchat streak has become the morning ritual for almost 90% of youngsters worldwide.

Social Media has an untapped potential in brand visibility and creating brand awareness with a generous target audience in all niches.

Brands like McDonald’s, Burger King, Coca-Cola, and Adidas are already loved by their audience due to their engagement on Social Media. However, certain brands still fail to meet their audience's expectations.

Don’t worry; revamping your social media strategy is not too late. You only need social media marketing mistakes to avoid, which we have listed below:

1. Not Listening to Your Audience

Customers are the most crucial part of the product life cycle, from when you start planning to when they provide feedback.

Not actively listening to your audience can cause significant loss, not just money, but it can result in negative publicity for your brand.

Here are a few things you can do to pay attention to your customers:

• Actively listen to your audience across all the touchpoints through their interactions.
• Take surveys and feedback before designing a new product or updating your existing services.
• Keep the customers in the loop by engaging them on social media and support forums.

Once your audience feels that their insights are essential to you and their voice is heard, you win half the game by winning their trust.

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2. Not Having a Clear Goal

You have a robust workflow for your marketing process. However, these efforts will not be practical if you do not have a clear goal before initiating your social media marketing strategies.

Ask yourself these questions:

• Who is your target audience?
• Which platform is used by them the most?
• What are the expectations of your audience?
• Will your strategies add any value to the customer experience?
• How often should you promote your posts across social media?

Once you have a clear objective, you can prepare the metrics to measure your goals against the expected results.

It will help you decide the time frame for your campaigns and optimize your budget and the time you spend to market your brand.

3. Lack of a Solid Strategy

Everyone knows social media is the key to getting the audience's attention. Yet, most of the time, companies lack a proper plan. You cannot just start posting about your products on social media.

You will need a strategy to pull off social media efforts. Without a plan, your marketing efforts will be just an arrow that goes nowhere.

Here’s how you can plan an effective strategy that will bring you the result:

• Assemble your marketing team and get down for a solid strategy to plan your social media content.
• Analyze your target audience and how they interact on the internet.
• Prepare a holistic strategy including different content formats and analyze what’s working with your audience.
• You can also invest in social media marketing tools to streamline your strategies.

Here are a few tools you can use to improve your social media marketing through a streamlined workflow:

• Buffer
• MeetEdgar
• Mention
• Brandwatch
• Social Insider

4. Not Tracking the Results

The market is rich with analytical tools that can help you track the performance of your marketing campaigns and social media strategies.

Failing to leverage these tools to see if your marketing efforts are paying off is as good as not marketing.

Benefits of tracking results:

• It allows you to determine the types of content that your target audience prefers.
• Feedback can help you with planning your next campaign.
• After reviewing the post reach, you can gauge the amount you must spend on paid promotion.

Here are a few tools to analyze your customer behavior:

• Google Analytics
• SimilarWeb
• Google Trends
• SocialRank

Don’t forget to add UTM parameters to your links, as that will save you from the Google Analytics new session discrepancies you might experience when not using parameters.

5. Not Optimizing Content for Each Platform

There are a ton of social media platforms that have emerged as potential channels to reach out to the target audience.

However, not all your users are simultaneously present across all the platforms.

Different platforms have different sharing formats:

• Facebook allows sharing of multiple photos, videos, blogs, and stories.
• Instagram allows only ten images to be posted simultaneously and videos under one minute.
• IGTV has changed the way videos are consumed through its vertical video format.

Optimizing content across each social media platform is advisable to get good results. Providing an omnichannel experience can work wonders, but this can backfire if you fail to produce content specific to each channel.

6. Poorly Handling the Negative Comments

Not everyone who uses your products and services will spread good reviews of your brand. It would be best to be open to negative comments about your brand as much as you like the praise.

Most of the time, companies fail to handle negative publicity. It harms their brand identity and can result in losing customers.

An angry customer is equivalent to a failed product when it comes to the brand’s success.

Below are a few tips for maintaining a healthy customer relationship:

• Your community management team must actively respond to user queries and comments.
• Rather than protecting or defending your brand in negative comments, empathize with your user's emotions.
• Try to resolve their problems as quickly as possible.
• Compensate for a lousy experience with complimentary gifts or free vouchers.

7. Not Interacting With Your Audience

How often have you seen people interested in the Twitter wars among world-class brands? Social Media keeps the mass well-informed about everything that happens around the world.

Engaging with your audience is imperative for brand awareness and visibility and for converting that audience into your brand promoters.

Below are a few methods to engage with your audience:

• Reply to the comments of your followers and the messages received on your official accounts.
• Repost the story tags on Facebook and Instagram.
• Respond to posts where you have been mentioned.

It is beneficial in the long run in fostering healthy customer relations.

8. Purchasing Fake Followers

Numbers are essential when it comes to showcasing your brand on social media. However, never resort to fake followers.

There are a lot of apps and websites that generate bot followers. However, your audience is intelligent. Moreover, a brand image, once blemished, is challenging to turn the other way. So, stay away from purchasing fake followers.

There are several other ways to get followers:

• Add value to your customer’s experience with your products.
• Use tools to analyze your audience’s behavior and cater to them with relevant content.
• Use hashtags on platforms like Twitter and Instagram to increase your reach.
• Couple organic reaches with paid promotions to ensure your posts get a broader audience that can be potential leads.
• Engage actively with your followers across all channels.

9. Not Being Active

Once you are on social media, you cannot be inactive there. It would be foolery to first invest time, effort, and money in building social media profiles and presence and then avoid creating content.

People will soon forget you with cutthroat competition if you are not active. Moreover, you would not want to be lost in oblivion.

Even if you are a small-scale business with insufficient content to stay on social media, post at least three times a week.

One of the best things you can do to stay active is to post user-generated content. Ask your audience to tag your brand; all you have to do is repost.

Do not forget that social media stories are one of the best ways to get yourself out there, and it will not take much time to design wooing reports.

You can use tools like Canva and Unfold, which have plenty of ready-to-use social media templates.

10. Measuring the Wrong KPIs

You might be a brand on the right track with a solid social media strategy and the tools to check user engagement.

But are you checking the proper digital marketing KPIs that will decide your growth? If not, it’s time to gear up for a strategic check on KPIs.

We described below how you can prepare KPI:

• With analytical tools, gauge your audience’s preference and the channels they engage in the most.
• Prepare metrics that align your goals with the results you are expecting. It can be the number of followers over a period, the number of conversions through social media, or even customer reviews.
• Keep closely checking your KPIs to prepare and execute a marketing strategy.

11. Too Much Brand Promotion

Brands that are loved by all are doing something right. What is that, you may ask? They add value to the user’s feed with helpful content to better their lives.

The ultimate goal of brands should be addressing the pain points of users. Brand identity and sales are a by-product in that case.

So, rather than filling your social media account with too much promotional content, create helpful experiences for your target audience. Promote your brand but with subtlety.

Start by sharing how your products and services have been helpful to your clients.

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12. Not Utilizing Influencer Marketing

We are here in another new year, and it is time you realize the potential of Influencer Marketing. The majority of brands are leveraging this potential.

Prepare your social media marketing strategy to include Influencer Marketing. Numerous tools will help you connect with the Influencers in your niche.

We are here going to name a few:

• Hypeauditor  
• Awario
• BuzzSumo
• Traackr
• Upfluence

You can also track the followers' engagement to see if the money you will be investing is worth it.

13. Not Understanding How the Algorithms Work

Just because your audience follows you on social media doesn’t mean your posts will likely appear on their feed whenever you publish one. Algorithms decide which content appears at the top of each user's newsfeed. It will be determined by their behavior and the stuff they will likely seek out and interact with while using social media.

It is one of the more significant social media mistakes. If you don’t understand social media algorithms, you can’t optimize your posts for them. It makes it crucial for marketers to learn about each platform they use and how their algorithm works.

While there is no exact formula to determine each algorithm, here are the things you should consider. 

Final Words on Social Media Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

Your customers are more intelligent and cannot be deceived by sales and discounts. Brands must provide value and unparalleled user experience to dominate competitors.

We hope the above points would have highlighted the mistakes you must avoid in crafting a seamless social media experience for your audience.