No business, be it small, medium, or large, can afford to ignore social media marketing. In terms of increasing brand awareness, social media marketing is unparalleled. However, there are several potential pitfalls involved in social media marketing as well. In this post, we’ll take you through what those pitfalls are and how your business can steer clear of them. In the long run, avoiding them can help your business grow not just on social media, but in the real world as well.
1. Only promoting products and services without providing value
Your business may have the best products and/or services in its niche. However, that shouldn’t translate into your social media posts being exclusively promotional. After all, every business wants to sell its products and/or services. So, what can you do to differentiate your business from the competition?
The answer lies in providing value to your target audience. Your social media posts should inform and educate your audience. If they do, your audience will take you for an expert in your niche, which is likely to serve as motivation for them to consider investing in your products. Quite simply, find out your audience’s pain points, and address them through your social media posts.
2. Not tweaking your social media marketing strategy
Sticking to a social media marketing strategy that’s not yielding desired results is a surefire way for the strategy to collapse. That’s why you should keep things flexible, i.e. make adjustments when and where necessary. To do this, you need to first develop a goal-oriented strategy, which will help you to track its progress (or the lack of it).
Additionally, you need to make the most of the analytics tools that are built into all major social media platforms. These tools will give you deep insights into what’s working and most importantly, what’s not. Through the identification of your strategy’s strengths and weaknesses, you can determine what you need to keep doing and what you should change.
3. Relying on bots for conversations
There’s no doubt about it – bots can handle conversations way more efficiently than humans. They’re much more affordable too. However, the fact is that automated social media responses are robotic, and if you truly want to form an emotional connection with your audience, you can’t rely on them.
So, instead of letting bots do the talking, hire humans to converse with your audience. Of course, this would mean considerable financial investment, as you’ll be required not only to recruit but also to train employees. However, in the long run, you can count on this approach to pay dividends.
4. Posting outdated content instead of evergreen and relevant content
Across the social media landscape, everything happens in the here and the now. So, it’s vital for your business to keep up with the times and post content that’s relevant to your target audience at the moment. Of course, evergreen content is an exception, but that’s only because evergreen content is timeless, i.e. it’ll provide value even if it’s accessed several years down the line.
What you don’t want to do at all is to post outdated content, i.e. content that your competitors posted months ago. At times, when your social media team runs out of ideas, it may seem easier to post older content. However, this can severely damage your business’s reputation and make it apparent to your target audience that it’s lagging behind its competitors.
5. Ignoring negative comments and reviews
No matter how hard you try to impress every member of your target audience, a few are bound to be disappointed. This disappointment may come to bite your business back in the form of negative comments and reviews. Some businesses tend to ignore the negativity altogether, but this is something we recommend against doing.
Remember, it’s easy to be positive in the face of positivity, but it can be quite difficult to remain positive when you encounter negativity. And this is something your audience will look at when going through your social media feeds. So, even if you get a negative comment or review, respond to it with care and if there’s an issue you can solve, solve it.
6. Buying followers and likes
Your social media marketing strategy should be about organic growth, i.e. real followers and subscribers and organic user engagement. Sure, today’s competitive social media landscape makes it difficult for new and emerging businesses to cement their footholds, and organic growth takes time.
However, just because organic growth is time-consuming doesn’t mean you should turn to purchase followers and user engagement. Of course, these practices may help your business’s social media pages in the short term, but they have the potential of doing long-term damage.
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