1. Posting Without A Strategy
The worst mistake your brand can make is not having a strategy for your content.
Having a social media strategy helps you stay more organized, less frustrated and keeps you focused on your brand’s overall messaging and goals. Once you’ve created a strategy, utilize scheduling platforms, like @planoly or Sprout Social, to schedule your posts in advance. Not sure how to create a social media strategy? Check out our blog post on content calendars for some ideas or contact us about our one on one consulting sessions.
2. Being Too Sales Oriented
It’s a give & take.
Obviously, as a brand, your ultimate goal is increasing sales. However, consumers & social media users are on platforms because they want to establish a relationship.
Give away free bits of information to your followers or include content that they can learn or grow from. As an example, at Something Social, we give away blog posts, such as this one, to help educate our followers about the social media space. We want to help our community grow & establish relationships that will be active long-term, instead of constantly pushing purchases and isolating our followers.
3. Not engaging with your audience
Your followers know best.
We can’t say it enough, it’s called “social” media for a reason. Your followers are your direct audience; take time to get to know their likes & dislikes before determining your social strategy and planning your content.
Regularly engage with your audience by doing giveaways or asking questions in your posts. Run Twitter polls to get direct feedback from your followers & ask for their input on design elements.
Utilize Instagram stories & Facebook Live videos to have open discussions concerning your product or business. For more ideas, read our blog post on “8 Ways to Use Instagram Stories to Make Your Business Stand Out.”
4. Pushing the same content across all platforms.
Your content should be platform specific.
If you have the exact same content on all of your social platforms, it doesn’t give your followers a reason to follow you in multiple spaces. Use Twitter for short facts & insights about your company, Facebook for sharing articles & videos and Instagram to establish your overall aesthetic and visual branding. Combining the strengths of all of the platforms in one social strategy will give your brand a well-rounded presence in the digital space.
5. Doing too much or too little.
It’s a balance.
A lot of companies are still stuck in the mindset of traditional marketing & tend to ignore the power social media can bring. Not maintaining a regular posting schedule can be detrimental to the growth of engagement and following on social platforms. On the flip side, posting too frequently can drive down your posts in Instagram & Facebook algorithms and can annoy your following, leading them to unfollow you. The cure? Test out posting frequency with your audience.
We recommend our clients post a minimum of 5 times per week on Instagram & Facebook with a maximum of two posts per day. Twitter should always be the most active platform with multiple posts going up daily. However, every single brand and account is different. Go back to who your target audience is and what their habits are online. If they are more active, then you can be more active too.
Written by our VP of Operations, Marissa Stahl.
How many of these were you doing? We won’t tell! 😉 Tweet us @somethingsocial or tag us on Instagram- @somethingsocial.
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