Having an online presence has many uses in this day and age. It can help generate business and attract others to transact with your business.
One way to establish an online presence is through the use of various social media platforms.
A lot of people use social media platforms in informal ways. However, if you’re trying to establish an online presence for your business, the informal use of social media platforms will be insufficient. Hence, the growing need for a social media marketing plan.
As with any undertaking, people are bound to make mistakes ‒ especially if you’re new to social media marketing. However, you shouldn’t be pressured, as the SMM experts you look up to started as a beginner as well.
Concerning this, knowing more about the common mistakes people make with their social media marketing plans can help you avoid them. At the same time, it can also help you create a better strategy to adopt when it comes to social media marketing.
With that said, in this article, you’ll find a better understanding of social media marketing through these mistakes. Read on below to find out the common mistakes that you should avoid for your social media marketing plan.
Having no social media marketing strategy
One of the more unfortunate mistakes when it comes to social media marketing strategy is not having a social media marketing strategy at all.
It’s fine and dandy not to have a social media marketing plan when you’re using it informally or for personal use. On the other hand, It is a grave mistake if you’re using it to establish an online presence.
A lot of businesses may underestimate the power of social media, and that’s the reason they’re not taking the time to strategize. They don’t realize that a lot of businesses online have profited off of social media.
The great thing about having a social media marketing strategy is that it helps direct your social media presence in the right way. Social media can give a business a lot of benefits when it comes to gaining an online presence. Given its power, you need to be able to handle it right, or you’ll find yourself without the right footing.
This is the reason it is important to have a plan for anything, including social media management.
Read also about Digital Marketing Strategy
Too much self-promotion
Enterprises that have an automatic following because of their relatively strong brand image take for granted their followers.
Due to that reason, they tend to post too much self-promotion on their social media. They think that social media is a free advertising space so they think they should post as much about their products and services as possible. This is such a common mistake for many people that they end up losing a lot of their followers.
If a brand has some followers, it doesn’t indicate a strong online presence. Instead, one should look at engagement in a business’ social media account.
If you’re posting a lot of self-promo, it’s almost a guarantee that your audience isn’t interacting with you as often as others online. Remember that social media and your followers aren’t just the chance to spend cheap money on advertising. It’s a community, and you need to create content that’s relevant to them and not just you.
Failure to engage with your audience
As mentioned before, you shouldn’t create content that caters to you only when you’re on social media. Instead, you should make sure that you engage with your target market as well when you’re on your social media platforms.
Relevant content that answers the concerns of your audience is the type of content you should be making.
Aside from that, social media is a platform where a lot of creators connect with their target audience. Thus, you should make sure that you are also responding to your audience’s comments and inquiries.
Additionally, you should also be engaging with posts that tagged or mentioned your brand.
Failure to engage with your audience can lead to you losing a significant chunk of your online audience. Hence, online engagement strategies are an important investment for your online presence.
Ignoring negative feedback
Nobody likes receiving negative feedback, and that’s understandable. After all, when you work hard on something, you put your heart into it, and it can hurt quite a bit to see and hear people talking badly about it.
However, this doesn’t mean that you should ignore negative feedback when you encounter it. Worse yet what you could do is block or delete the comment or post. This will not go down well with your audience, so do your best to resolve customer complaints. Otherwise, this can communicate to others your reluctance to grow and improve upon yourself.
Aside from that, it’s also telling people that you aren’t open to communicating with your audience. It may look like you don’t care about the concerns of your consumers, which is bad for business.
All you need is a change of perspective. Look at feedback as an opportunity to do better and improve customer service.
Buying followers
If you want to lose the respect of people in your industry through your social media, then you could do that by buying followers. Of course, that’s not a suggestion you should follow.
Nobody respects anybody who has bought followers. It’s an inauthentic way of getting followers when everybody’s all about authenticity nowadays.
Besides, having bought followers will do absolutely nothing for your business. You wouldn’t be able to reach or accomplish any business goals with that. Plus, it doesn’t even increase your conversions.
Sure, it looks nice to see that your follower count increases, but they’re genuine. They aren’t taking any of the actions that genuine followers do.
Anyway, getting genuine followers shouldn’t be that hard. Also, follower count is not the right metric you should shape your social media strategy on.
Forgetting to reward your real followers
It’s always good to create a variety in the posts that you make on your social media. One way to do that is by creating giveaways or a reward for your followers.
Hosting giveaways online is a popular social media marketing tactic and for a good reason. Giveaways are a way for you to reward your existing followers, and it’s a great way to engage with them.
Depending on the amount of participation that you expect from your followers, you should match the reward you’re giving based on that.
If you’re hosting a giveaway, it doesn’t have to be monetary compensation. It could be a free product or service, depending on the type of business that you have. You can even try collaborating with your customers to find out what kind of reward they’d want to get the most from your brand.
Publishing bad content
Often, people think that posting just about anything on social media is good enough so long as you post regularly. Although in some ways, you can be rewarded because you post often. That doesn’t mean you have to jump on every trend and create content related to that just to get the numbers rolling high for you.
Instead, what you should be doing is creating content that is relevant to your customers. At the same time, you should also share posts that you didn’t make yourself that are still relevant to your customer base.
Not optimizing for each social network
Search engine optimization is also important for your social media platform and not just for your website. Thus, you must sprinkle in some keywords here and there as well.
Keyword planning and research should be a part of your social media marketing strategy. You want people who are interested in the products and services that you offer to be able to find you during the moment when they want or need your products or services. Hence, the need for search engine optimization.
Wrap up
If you want to establish a strong online presence without all the hiccups, then knowing which common mistakes to avoid will be helpful. Thus, this article should hopefully help guide you in the creation of social media marketing without all the errors.
About the Author – Kevin Urrutia is the founder of Voy Media, a New York social media ads company. Voy Media believes in the power of Facebook advertising in helping businesses to boost their sales and improve their conversions. Voy Media aids businesses to push the right message to the right audience to deliver the right outcomes.
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