How to avoid these 7 common social media marketing mistakes

Social media is one of the most reasonable ways of marketing your brand. But that doesn’t mean you renounce other advertising methods. Each method has its own set of advantages and disadvantages; it’s about picking the one with just the right benefits for your brand. The attribute of social media which enables you to entrance your followers with your marketing campaigns and turn them into loyal fans is something that makes social media as the go-to way of marketing.

But there is one other way which can influence people to buy from you, and that is word of mouth. Yes! You read that right. It has been proved that over 80% of consumers buy a product after talking about it with or being recommended by their friends or family. Social media, being a communication platform, has taken word of mouth digital. People log in to their accounts and network; and when they communicate, word of mouth plays its part. Social media has expedited the process of word of mouth, creating profuse possibilities for proactive marketers.

It is assessed that, daily, about 800 million people use Facebook, about 1 billion tweets are sent out, and about 100 million people views are generated on YouTube. With such enormous figures, the opportunity for marketers to put out their brand in front of the people is more ubiquitous than ever!

When you start marketing on social media, you are bound to make mistakes. Even the best of marketers and brands have made mistakes and learned from them. Because that is how it is with social media marketing, you can’t get it right in the first effort. To curtail the field of your mistakes, you can always learn from other’s mistakes. Here are some of the social media marketing blunders most people make; learn how to elude them and make your social media marketing game impeccable!

Starting away without a strategy.

Well, your ambition may earn a round of applause, but this is one of the most common errors. We incline to think that social media marketing is so easy with all the options readily available! It turns out that the more options you get, the more complex it is to create a winning campaign. So before diving in, it would be apt to learn about the different social media platforms. List out the platforms which you think could be useful to market your brand and why. Devise a strategy of how you’re going to promote your brand as per your customer’s interests and demand. Network with others by joining a group, creating a fan page, participating in events, and so on. If you don’t know how to create a social media strategy, and how to promote your business, enroll yourself into many social media marketing courses available both offline and online to gain full knowledge before starting.

Publish in the same way over and over.

Some people like to see pictures of products, while some may favor watching short descriptive product videos. It is quite natural; consumers are idiosyncratic; what one person may prefer doesn’t necessarily have to be liked by the other. So, it is always best to publish content on social media in different formats. Your content can be a video, a picture, or an engaging piece of text. It is even better if you share content with different nature such as humorous, funny, quotes, or sayings; of course, keeping it related to your product and aligned with your marketing strategy. Generally, marketers use a combination of all the formats to obtain best results.

One-person job.

Social media is a team job. You can’t do it all by self. If you own a small business and don’t have the budget to hire specialists, you better educate yourself about various tools such as ‘Hootsuite’ that assist you in operating different social media channels at once. This will make things a little easier for you. Even then, managing multiple social media will be a tedious job, which will result in your pages suffering due to lack of proper attention. Whereas if you run a large company, you are better off with hiring a social media manager to keep track of your promotions, published content, future content, and much more.

Being inconsistence with content publishing.

Make a time-table and stick to it; it is simple as that. You need not post more frequently for this; you instead need to stick to a pre-decided time to post. If you decide to publish 10 posts in 10 days, publish one quality post a day than doing boring content thrice a day. Just make sure they are all posted at the same time daily. Quality content will keep your audience hooked and make them anticipate your next post; it adds to their excitement of the consumers when they know the content schedule but not the content matter.

Begin with all social media channels at once.

Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, or Snapchat, there are numerous options to make your first brand page. When you begin with your social media marketing journey, it is advisable to go by one social media at a time. List out the pros and cons of various social media platforms and pick one of them to get started. Make a page, master how the platform works, understand how people react to your business, build your audience, move to a new social media channel, and repeat. Getting started with as many channels at once may not be the niftiest thing to do; it will limit you from making the best of each platform.

Overspend initially.

It doesn’t matter if you have a large budget; you must not overspend. Just before you commence your social media journey, right when you make a social media strategy, it is imperative to settle on a budget that you will shell out for social media marketing during a specific period. Because no matter how good you design your first campaign, it will not be even close to perfect, if not ideal. With time, you will learn and know what works for your brand and what your customers like. Moreover, as you gain experience with social media marketing, you can yield better results for the money you pay.

Not connecting people to your website.

The objective of using social media marketing can be to raise brand awareness, build an audience, or advertise products; all these come down to only one goal – driving sales. Selling is something you have to do on your website or a page. Thus, it is necessary to add a link to your website/page in the captions of your social media posts to drive traffic to your website/page