5 Social Media Mistakes You’re Making Right Now
Make sure that you aren’t making these five social media mistakes when posting to your social media accounts. Doing so can result in you not seeing the results that you hope for. It can even make things worse for you by turning off current and potential customers to your brand.
When it’s your personal social media you don’t have to post with any kind of consistency. You don’t have to plan your posts to reach an ultimate goal. There is no specific formula you should follow to ensure you have optimal engagement. Your personal social media posts are for your enjoyment and for sharing with friends and family. This is not the case with your business social media accounts. You have them for a specific purpose and that is to grow your business. So you need to approach them with the same purposeful action that you do for the rest of your business. Make your social media successful by avoiding these five mistakes.
Acting With No Plan
Don’t start posting random content with no plan. You need to have defined goals and map out how you’re going to achieve them. Create a calendar of when and what you plan to post. This will ensure you have consistency so you’re followers know what to expect from your social media.
Create your plan with your end goal in mind. Do you want to increase awareness by gathering my followers? Or maybe you want to increase knowledge by educating and engaging more. Or perhaps your goal is to increase your sales through social media referrals.
Each of these goals requires a different approach to social media because the people in each of these categories are at different stages of the sales funnel. You need to speak directly to your intended audience and relate to them, in the buying process.
Assuming Size Matters
The biggest mistake small business owners make is to assume that having a huge follower base is the number one goal. While having thousands of followers looks great on your trophy shelf, it doesn’t actually mean much. Instead, focus on building a group of highly engaged and quality followers. These are people actively interested in your brand and more likely to purchase.
Think about it this way, would you rather spend your time communicating with 100,000 people who will never buy your products or 1,000 people who will repeatedly buy? (You should choose the 1,000) There are a few different engagement data analytics that you can look at and track. You could look at the number of people who like or comment on your posts. Or you could look at the number of people who share your posts. Finally, you could track how many people purchase through your posts.
Spreading Yourself Thin
Don’t make the mistake of thinking you need to be on every single social media platform. This will quickly overwhelm you and you’ll do none of them exceptionally well. It’s better to be amazing at one or two then mediocre at five or six. The worst thing you can do is start out strong on a platform, and then die off. This gives followers the impression that you’re no longer in business.
One of the most important parts of social media that people forget is that you’re supposed to be social. This means interacting with your followers. If they reach out to you, then you need to reach out to them. This can get difficult and overwhelming if you’re trying to interact on multiple social media accounts.
Ignore the Competition
As with anything in business, you need to know what your competition is doing. If you’re tracking everything else, why aren’t you tracking their social media performance? Regularly visit their website, check out their social media, and read their press releases. You can set up automatic alerts for this to make it easier. Knowing what your competition is doing will help you figure out what works and what doesn’t by learning from their mistakes. It will also help you stand out by doing something different than everyone else in the industry.
Not Monitoring Progress
How do you know if your efforts are delivering the results you want if you’re not monitoring your social media performance? You need to track your social media post performance. This will let you know what to post more of and what to post less of. Look at how your posts perform. Does a certain type of content perform better than the others? For example, do text, pictures, or video perform the best? Then look at the subject matter, are their certain topics that perform better than others? Maybe your audience loves user-generated content. It isn’t professional photo perfect, but it directly speaks to your audience.
Fix Your Social Media Mistakes
If you’ve been making one or more of these social media mistakes, then now is the time to fix it. You can’t go back and change what’s already done. But you can move forward making the corrections that need to be made. Sometimes it helps to take a step back and start over. This could mean stepping back to assess what your goal is for your social media accounts. Then creating a calendar of content to work towards that goal. You’ll then focus your energy on having excellent content for one or two social media accounts.
Once you have your new plan established, you’ll start tracking your content’s performance. This will let you know if your current plan is working and what adjustments you need to make moving forward. Remember, it’s ok if you don’t get it perfect the first time out. What is important is that you can evaluate and adjust as you go to optimize your social media’s performance. Contact me today and let’s get your social media on track.
