Top 10 Social Media Strategy Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
By Shelby Ballou
Social media is one of today’s most effective media platforms. It has helped small businesses grow larger and faster than ever before. With that said, social media has also resulted in the destruction of many businesses that misused it, damaging their reputations and wasting their time and money.
Below are the top 10 dangers of using social media without a strategic plan in place.
1. Adopting The Wrong Social Persona
Creating a social persona that isn’t likable is a danger to your brand. On social media, your brand needs to be warm, friendly, and informative. It needs to show that you’re genuinely interested in making connections with others. To build a likable social persona, you need to pinpoint your target audience and gear your content towards that audience.
2. Underestimating Reach and Longevity
With the internet and social media, nothing you say will ever truly go away. Once a conversation begins, it’ll be out there for the world to see and can resurface at any time. Even just one slip up, no matter how old it is, can suddenly reappear for everyone to analyze.
3. Pushing Sales Too Quickly
Without a social media strategy in place, you might make the mistake of pushing sales before providing value to your audience. Most people that use social media are looking for information, entertainment, and valuable content. If you provide them with these things, you’ll eventually earn clicks, potential leads, and eventual sales. If you don’t, you may cause harm to your brand.
4. Taking On Too Many Platforms
If you don’t have a solid social media strategy in place, you won’t be able to effectively manage multiple social media accounts. Without set goals, you’ll run into complications while trying to keep all of your platforms up-to-date.
5. Lack of Proofreading
Everyone makes occasional mistakes with grammar and punctuation, but there’s a large number of social media critics who are thrilled to point out these mistakes. Be careful not to use too many abbreviations, and proofread your posts at least twice before publishing.
6. Failure To Measure Data
It’s not enough to simply create a social media strategy. You need to create a strategy that includes Google Analytics. Google Analytics will give you a clear picture of what your visitors are doing and how social media plays a role in the sales cycle.
7. Using The Wrong Metrics To Define Success
If you don’t have a social media strategy in place, you probably don’t know which metrics matter. Social analytics aren’t the only things you need to measure. You also need to learn how to identify key performance indicators that are specific to your business.
8. Treating Social Media The Same As Traditional Media
Social media is not the same as traditional media. Most seasoned business owners are used to traditional advertising methods, and many jump into social media blindly. The concept of inbound marketing is still foreign to them, and they learn the hard way that constantly blasting customers is considered spam. Ultimately, using social media as a successful marketing tool depends on building trust with your target audience.
9. Not Addressing Customer Service
One of the biggest risks of not having a social strategy in place is not being aware that you have to constantly address concerns and comments posted by customers. Also, it’s important to make sure that you respond in a helpful and timely manner. With so much competition on the web, it’s easier than ever for customers to turn to other brands with better customer service.
10. Sacrificing Experience For Money Savings
If you think you can hire a novice to successfully manage your social media, think again. Inexperience can result in disaster, as well as an ineffective social media strategy. Hire someone knowledgeable about various platforms and effective social media trends.
