7 social media blunders that can cost your business

Social Media Strategy

Nowadays social media is home to both big and small enterprises. These businesses use social media to market and promote their brands in a variety of ways. Sadly, many organizations make blunders in their strategies that can cost them heavily. Below are seven common social media blunders that you might make. If you’re guilty ensure you learn from your mistakes before you burn.

Allowing interns to run your social media

Interns do not understand your brand well enough to handle your social media channels.  Allowing interns to manage your social media is courting trouble. They can burn your business with spelling and grammatical errors, sharing their personal opinions which may highly differ with your brand and lack of in-depth knowledge when speaking about your enterprise.

Just because someone attended college and has an understanding of social media doesn’t imply they should manage your public communication avenues without supervision. Ultimate social media management entails complete understaffing of company’s editorial strategy, services, overall business, products and much more. A social media professional with several years of work experience should supervise interns should you choose to use them.

Remember, you can use tools provided on platform such sharedcount.com to best manage social media platforms and get all the metrics you need.

Lack of clear social media strategy

Most companies focus only on social media objectives. They jump into social media channels just because they see its possibility to connect with more customers. There is need to connect your social media activities to larger business goals from the start so that you can provide value to your users. This will help you to calculate your ROI.

Design a distinct strategy for each social media channel you are on based on specific performance indicators tying your overall marketing and sales goals. Goals can range from increasing brand awaress, friving traffic to your site, generating new leads, growing revenue, signups or sales, boosting brand engagement, building a community to increasing press mentions and social listening.

Utilizing social media just for marketing

It is not everything if your only goal in social media is marketing. It is one way that can drive away your followers quite fast. They should get value from your activities, not just getting marketing messages alone.

More important, social media should be used in engaging your customers- addressing customer service issues. Engaging customers can also be achieved through Q&A sessions, chatting and setting up things such as polls. This will help to reach to new audiences as well as sustain followers.

Limiting yourself to only popular channels

This is also another mistake to be avoided. To achieve success in marketing, you have to involve multi-channel strategy. Many brands are only established on popular channels such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, ignoring superb channels such as Instagram, Snapchat and Pinterest, where there are highly engaged users.

Ignoring the ‘social’ in social media

Many businesses concentrate on branding themselves and forget the main aim of social media which is to socialize with your audiences. Shouting out your content every time you have a chance will only make you look like you only care about yourself. No one is going to follow you. To flourish in this space, you need to react and engage with your audience.

You don’t want to be known as the spammy, unprofessional self-serving brand by your audience. Ensure there are conversations going on.

Lack of focus and consistency

When designing their content, many companies forget to focus their content to address the needs of their audience. They end up writing for everyone which is a wild catch and bad for ROI. They forget to do audience needs assessment to understand the best way to serve them, ending up on the wrong side. To excel, your focus should be on those who matter, mostly your customers and prospective customers.

On discovering your focus, marry consistency. Develop a posting schedule so that you can craft your messages well and ahead of time and post them in time. Consistency makes you highly dependable. Your timeline should always have fresh and engaging content regularly.

It is about aligning your efforts with business objectives.

Boring social

Are there times you wonder why no one is engaging your posts on social media? The fact of the matter is you’re your content might be utterly boring. When content is not creative or engaging, it provides no value to your customers and no one will bother to engage with it. Such content misses videos, images, useful quotes and stats.

To create powerful, attractive and engaging content, look at it from the perspective of the audience. Do they appeal to you? Do they attract your attention? No, then shift your gear.

Companies burn from this kind of content. They lose their followers quickly because there is nothing to magnetize or hold them on your platform.

The mistakes might not look as serious but they can bring you down if not rectified immediately you discover them.

One thought on “7 social media blunders that can cost your business”

  1. Hi,
    Wonderful insights. I totally agree to the fact that many of the brands only target popular social mediums sites instead of trying to expand their approach to other various available platforms like Instagram, which offers tremendous marketing opportunities. However, as you have said, they lack the “Social” thing in social medias, where they keep bombarding the users with content after content not really putting in the effort to address the users issue and need which ultimately leads to fewer ROI and than everybody starts blaming those platforms instead of tweaking their own strategy. Really loved your article, keep sharing such posts. Thanks.

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