While social media marketing may seem simple, it can be quite complex and take more time than you think. In order to be successful, your social media postings need to be high-quality, engaging and consistent. They all must show that you have personal skills, an understanding of your audience and the ability to know (and use) the right tools to attract the right audience. Moreover, social media marketing isn’t stagnant. It’s always evolving; therefore, you’ll also have to keep up with the latest trends.
A bit overwhelmed? That’s ok. Let’s take a look at 3 social media marketing mistakes that are easy to make and what you can do instead to improve your brand.
Piggybacking on your brand’s social media accounts
Let’s start off with a big one: keeping personal and professional social media posts separate. Today’s society spends a ton of time using all that social media has to offer. The problem is that some use the same social media strategies for their professional brand as they do for their personal brand—posting what they want, when they want, with no regard to whether the posting will be a positive marketing move.
When you’re using social media for marketing your brand, it’s important to track the results of how your posts hit to know whether you’re making positive moves for your brand. Failure to track your marketing results means that you’ll never improve them.
Pro tip: Before blindly making social media posts, decide what you hope your postings will achieve, set goals for reaching those milestones and build a strategy to ensure you achieve them.
Neglecting to use analytics
Of all the trends you can track with analytics, social media is among the hardest. This is due to the nature of social media and its tendency to boil down to vague concepts that are hard to label and track. For example, brand awareness and reputation are important marketers for a brand, but they’re almost impossible to track using analytics. Rather, you’ll need to track your social media engagement rate and follower growth.
Using analytics can be even trickier when there are measurements that are next to impossible to gather, regardless of the analytic tools you are using. One such measure is how many of your followers actually read a tweet or view an Instagram post. These factors can lead many social media managers to give up on analytics.
Pro tip: Rather than ignoring analytics altogether, consider using tools that are made for social media analytics. There are dozens of options on the market and the one that works best for you will be determined by your goals and how much you want to spend.
Mishandling negative comments and feedback
Let’s face it, you’ll never be able to make everyone who reads your social media posts happy, so you’re bound to have both negative comments and feedback submitted to your various social networks. While you never want to fight with a commenter publicly, the worst thing you can do is completely ignore or delete this feedback.
Pro tip: Rather than ignoring or deleting negative feedback, you should throw yourself positively into the conversation. Engage negative posts and try to offer solutions to remedy why your customer feels this way. This engagement shows that you care both about your brand and how your (potential) customers feel.