Top 10 Mistakes Businesses and Brands Make with Social Media

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Social media has become a great tool for organizations to take advantage of. It can be used to interact with customers, engage with potential users, and bring traffic to the website. More than 90 percent of organizations are socially online today.

If your social media strategies are not yielding you much result then surely you are making mistake. But don’t worry. In this post, you will learn about the most common mistake done on social media and also how to overcome it.

#1. Not Having a Procedure

“What is your strategy?” This is the first question people ask before performing any action.

Just think about the time when you set up your business, the very first thing you have done is made a strategy. A strategy includes goals, audience, efforts to be made, and so on. Same applies to social media marketing. Being on social media platform without a strategy won’t profit your business.

Worldwide 2.8 billion people are active on social media. Every second lot of information is being posted. Now, you can imagine how soon uploaded information can be lost.

What can you do to not let this happen?

  • Define Goals
  • Create Content Calendar
  • Post Frequently
  • Follow your Target Audience
  • Invest Time

#2. Being On All Social Media Platform

Present on every platform means giving a lot of your time, effort, and creating relevant content for each platform. Hence results in existing on some while neglecting another platform. Most of the businesses make this mistake. This leaves a bad impression on the audience.

How to choose right platform?

Every platform has their uniqueness. Facebook is good for the long post with a link, the Twitter post is expected to be of 140 characters with few hashtags, Pinterest for bookmarking links, Instagram for sharing pictures with a number of hashtags and short videos. Go for a platform which has a best-suited audience for your business.

Analyze which source is bringing more traffic to your site and where most of the user is engaging with your brand. Choose that platform and give all your 100% to it.

#3. Ignoring Comments

Nowadays, social media has become a platform not only to share information but to directly connect to any business. People look forward to a reply from brands.

Don’t panic after seeing a negative comment. Not everyone will love what you do. People are going to compare with others. Responding to such situation says a lot about your brand. It’s in your hand what kind of impression you want to leave about your enterprise.

Common Mistakes Brand Makes:

  • Not taking customer comment seriously and neglecting
  • Deleting negative comments can impact bad reputation
  • Relying on automation can get you in trouble
  • Giving apologize instead of assurance
  • Replying too late

How to reply comments?

  • Try to reply as soon as possible.
  • Solve their problem and issues.
  • Treat them politely and with respect.
  • Build trust.
  • Taking it as an opportunity and dealing with such comment will engage you with your followers and increase your reputation.

#4. Neglecting To Know Your Target Audience

Are your followers engaging with your brand? No!

Then you should consider this point.

Having social media account, nice and creative post, and few followers won’t lead you to success.  You need to broaden your circle. Knowing your audience and reaching them should be your ultimate goal.

How to understand your audience?

  • Find what they are liking and following
  • Discover their geographical location
  • What interest and engage them most?
  • At what time of day they are interacting?

#5. Promoting Yourself Too much or Too less

People buy from the brands which they follow. It becomes the responsibility of business to make their brand most appealing to their followers. Keep this thing in mind that posting too many promotional messages makes user annoyed and too little make them unfollow you.

Social media is not only meant for promoting yourself instead it is a platform to build relationships and trust with the user. Being successful in this can convert your leads to sales.

How to promote yourself?

Share information useful for your customer. Let it be content from other sources. Now, you might wonder sharing others content is like sharing your traffic with others. But it is not true, as it will increase your brand awareness, visibility, and relationship with another brand.

Business needs to sell their product/services. Hence, it becomes important to post promotional material. But plan when to post promotional messages because user engagement and interaction is the crucial thing.

#6. Not Taking Advantage of Hashtags

Nowadays, the popularity of hashtags has increased tremendously. Hashtags can be used on any social media platform. Hashtags are not only trending but also most engaging one. Most businesses make the mistake of including popular hashtags in their post without thinking of its relevance. Hence, fails to reach the target audience.

Which hashtags to include?

Research hashtags relevant and popular to your post and includes them. As targeting right one will get you top similarly, wrong ones will get you in trouble.

Create hashtags related to your brand and encourage the user to follow. One of such examples is Coca-Cola Company. It has smartly engaged the audience by its #ShareACoke hashtag campaign. So many people shared their stories on social media using this hashtags.

#7. Not Showing Who You Are

It is good to think and create something out of the box but making it unrelated to your brand will obviously leave a negative effect. People unfollow the brand that posts too much irrelevant content.

A person follows you to know about your business, what you are up to, what’s your next step. Business in order to show that they are up to date, post viral content of trending topic that has no relation to the brand message. Hence, leave a false impression.

What to do?

When posting something different, make sure that it doesn’t backfire. Just like shooting an arrow in dark. Don’t be afraid to take the risk. But share a valuable piece of content with followers. After all, at end of the day, people remember those who created value to them.

#8. Little Interaction with Your Audience

Many face this problem that despite having a nice social profile with a good number of users and content, they don’t get responses. This is because of lack of communication with followers.

Another big mistake any brand makes in order to maintain their image is paying for like and followers. Is this going to convert leads into sales? Not at all! You go in loss. As this person is not your potential clients.

How to engage users?

Social media is an opportunity for business to interact and connect with its user.

  • Grow your network.
  • Encourage people to take participation in your post.
  • Post content they are interested in.
  • Give offers and discount.

#9. Posting The Same Content Across Platforms

This is one of the most common mistake business makes. Each platform is different so does its content should.

People expect to see a different kind of content on each platform, seeing the same content on each and every platform make them annoyed. This decreases your engagement.

For example, on Instagram people like to see beautiful photos. On Twitter, a 140 character post is expected. And a long post on Facebook.

How to overcome from same content?

Create an alluring image for Instagram that conveys your message. Post a video on Youtube that shows your product/services.

The key point to remember here is that choose platform where your audience hangs out the most. Otherwise, you won’t benefit.

#10. Not Growing Followers List

Who doesn’t want to expand their business? Obviously No one!

If you don’t enlarge your network, your business sales graph is going to remain as it is.

The numbers of followers you have on your list are the ones who already know about business. In order to increase your traffic, interaction and sales, you need to grow your audience.

How to grow your network?

  • Post informative and actionable content
  • Cross promote post
  • Engage with users
  • Use hashtags wisely
  • Hold a contest
  • Analyze and make a strategy

Wrapping it up

Social media networking can be a compelling and cost controlled technique for connecting with potential shoppers, drawing in with current fans and expanding deals.

And follow the solution explained. You will surely be successful in achieving your goals.

Keep trying, testing, and tweaking your strategies.

Did you find these tips useful? Share your thoughts with us!