Social media marketing can be a daunting task when you are starting out with no knowledge of best practices. As hard as it is to obey correct and best practices, it’s even easier to fall into doing malpractices. Here are seven things you should avoid doing when working on your social media marketing.
Posting at your own leisure
The time when you are available to create a post isn’t always the same time your followers are online. Especially when your target market is on the other side of the globe, posting outside of the times when your followers browse social media will only hurt your exposure. Your content will be missed and tucked away by more recent content. Ideally, you want to post when your users are most active so you can catch them fresh when they’re looking for content.
Simply Measured has some free tools that you can use to find out the ideal time for posting. Given a user base, Simply Measured will show the days and times when engagement is best.
Putting too much value on the number of followers
Contrary to popular belief, having a large number of likes or followers on your social media platforms isn’t always beneficial. Especially if your likes are from sponsored promotions (or bought), your number of likes can work against you. This is because social sites analyze your post and how many of your followers engaged with it. Your content will only be further propagated if it has a good follower-to-engagement ratio. If the ratio is low, the social site will mute your content in favor of newer content as yours will be considered low quality.
What is ideal here is that all your followers are actual consumers or potential consumers in your sales funnel of your brand who will engage with your quality posts.
Not interacting with your followers
When you’re just spamming content by creating post after post, only focused on your own brand, you’ll fail to generate a meaningful and loyal following. Eventually, people will start viewing you as simply spamming their feeds and will end up in your brand being unfollowed.
People follow content because it adds quality to their feeds. So be sure to contribute quality content. Interact with them by looking at the comments section and responding to questions and commentary. You can also consider sharing other content which is in line with your followers’ interests and non-detrimental to your brand identity. The key idea is to interact and contributing to the feed.
Maintaining a bad persona
One of the worst mistakes you can do is create a bad online voice. Always avoid commenting on and sharing content about controversial or negative topics. You need to remember that your followers, although sharing a common interest, don’t necessarily agree with each other on everything or agree with your opinion. Clashing with your followers can earn you a bad name, resulting to un-follows and a very negative reputation which can be impossible to repair. Always keep your brand’s tone light and stress-free to remain approachable.
Sharing the same thing across all social platforms
Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus. You may have a representation in all social platforms, but are you optimizing your posts for those platforms? A cut-and-paste practice when creating a post for all these platforms won’t cut it. Google SEO guidelines (which index social posts) insist that all content posted by your brand has to be at least 20% original from other posts. A post that obeys Twitter’s 140-character limit doesn’t necessarily translate well when brought to Facebook and Google Plus. So make sure you observe best practices across all platforms.
Going in without a plan
One of the more common pitfalls of social media marketers is logging to a social site and starting to create posts without a coherent marketing plan. What results from this practice are posts which are inconsistent and incoherent and of low quality. This is the sort of practice which yields one-liner posts such as “It’s rainy outside, have some of our product to keep you warm!” or “Have some of Product X! It’s safe, it’s effective!”. Always have a marketing campaign with a clear goal and scope in mind and focus on that. You may focus on your first campaign to first increase your following. And then you may decide to work on promoting one of your products next. The idea is to plan your posts so that you don’t end up just winging it.