7 Social Media Marketing Mistakes Which Drown Your Campaigns

We all use social media. This is an indisputable fact. Although there are tons of guides about social media marketing, many companies still make mistakes which shouldn’t appear in 2018. Here are 7 bad habits in Social Media Marketing.

1. You Keep Using Social Media For Sales Only

Research provides that nearly 46% of Social Media users tend to unfollow brands because of too many promotional messages.

So, how to generate sales through social media not being pushy at the same time?

For some reason, they are called “social” not “selling” so make them social. How?

Offer your followers HELP.

Let’s be honest, people love buying but they don’t like to be sold. Instead of being sold your potential customers would like to feel that you want to solve their problems, help them, that you don’t see them as a walking banknote. This is what you have to do – offer them help. Research says that people use Google to find the answer to their questions, get to know something they need, not just buy and go.

By using social media monitoring tools and following topics which are related to your business activity you are able to find new clients without selling them anything but by offering help. Like here:

You can do this using @brand24 Kelly. If you want a walk through, just let me know

— Mick Griffin (@MickGriffin) July 27, 2018

It’s an immense chance to show your helpful approach but remember not to sell your product by all means. Your goal is to help them, not only charge them and say goodbye. This is the secret of companies that use social media to increase sales.

When your answer is honest and helpful you’ll be considered as a professional, a true expert in your field. The people you helped may not become your customers right away, but will surely remember who helped them while in need and may come back to you when will need your services.

2. Lack Of Spontaneity In Creating Content For Social Media

Another thing which makes me go bananas is boredom and predictability. In order to make the potential customer interested in your product, it is no longer enough to have predictable social media content ideas. It’s almost 2019, wake up!

To be clear, it is absolutely right to lead your SM profiles according to well-thought-out strategy but it is also important to not forget about being spontaneous sometimes. If everything that you post is carefully planned and there is no place for improvisation and not only strict-to-business content, your followers may wonder if there is a real person who is managing your profiles.

Give me likes, give me sweet little likes

Another popular mistake among a lot of marketers is focusing on likes, shares, hearts etc. under their posts. I agree that tons of likes, shares, and hearts under our post looks nice, give us a dopamine shot and make us feel like we’ve done a great job but it can be tricky.

If your post encourages your followers to visit your website, register to your newsletter, download trial version of your software etc. the most important factor is the revenue, conversion rate. What’s the use of for example 200 likes if your post didn’t generate a single transaction that you want? If your post works, meaning people are reacting to your call to action and do what you asked them for, this is a good piece of content. If, However, they don’t, you need to think what could go wrong, even if you gained likes and hearts.

3. Bad Selection Of Social Media Platforms For Business

Also, one of the reasons why your social media campaigns are trash is a half-baked selection of platforms, which you want to conquer. There are no shortcuts here like for example “three best social media platforms for marketing” because every business is different and requires careful analysis. Luckily, nowadays we have social media monitoring tools like Brand24 which shows you the exact number of mentions, inter alia, on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, video platforms, blogs etc.

You need to remember that every platform has its pros and cons, a specific type of content and you have to know how to use them. There is no universal way to choose those platforms. The best way is to examine what type of content is most popular on each platform, what branches are most popular and compare this with our strategy. You can easily do this kind of research using the Brand24 tool. It takes three easy steps.

First, create an account.

Then type your keywords

Usually, we recommend keywords like:
your brand name, your product name, branded hashtag.

The mentions and their quantity on each of the platforms will be displayed here:

Having these data you can easily predict, what are best social media platforms for your business and where your potential clients are. Nice and easy.

4. You Don’t Use Social Media Monitoring

One of the common mistakes which marketers tend to make is overlooking mentions about their company. What if some popular influencer used your product and reviewed it? It would be nice to say thank you and maybe talk about cooperation possibilities in the future?

On the other hand, maybe someone is giving you an unflattering opinion because the product you have delivered doesn’t meet the customer’s expectations? Such an opinion shouldn’t be left unanswered.

Fortunately, by using social media monitoring tools you can always keep up to date with mentions about your company. Once you have created your free trial account go to “Mentions” section to check out the newest mentions about you.

If you would like to know which authors write about you most often go to “Sources”.
Here you can see a list of authors…

…and the websites with the greatest number of mentions about you.

In section “Analysis” you can see a list of the most popular:

Mentions

Authors

The best trending hashtags

The influence of social media authors

The most active social media authors

The most active sites

The most influential sites

As if all this was not enough, you can also check most active locations and the context of a discussion. You won’t get bored 😉

Below, you can see the summary of mentions in figures and mentions’ categories.

Also, Brand24 app delivers you a set of features like sentiment analytics which tells you whether a mention is a positive, negative or neutral and influencer score which informs you about the reach of each author ranked from 1 to 10.

These features may be extremely useful and helpful during social media mentions tracking.

5. You Have No Strategy

Instead of a long text, I decided to prepare some questions you should ask yourself when developing a Social Media Marketing strategy:

6. You Don’t Use User-Generated Content

By user-generated content, you can expand your reach without spending money on it! Sounds cool but how to achieve this?

The easiest way to get a UGC is to simply ask people for it, as simple as that. As an example, look at Instagram and Twitter profiles of car brands like KIA, Skoda or Mitsubishi. They simply wrote a call to action for their clients to show photos with their cars.

As a result, their customers publish posts related to the brand thereby increasing the brand’s reach and awareness. Also, with the help of UGC, you can increase your organic traffic.

Why is User-Generated Content so important?

Ask yourself: are you more willing to read sponsored posts on Facebook or these ones which grab your attention with interesting content, graphics or engagement (yes, engagement is important but treating it as the only relevant factor is a mistake)?

Using UGC you can also increase your credibility towards potential clients. If you seek more information about customer live testimonials, their usage and benefits of their use – read an article about live customer testimonials as widgets on your website tailored by Tom.

7. You Fail In Social Media Crisis

Every company has unhappy clients but the difference between them is how they react to them. When you notice that somebody wrote a negative opinion about you, your company, product, service or one of your employees, you have to react. It’s unacceptable to leave the dissatisfied customer alone.

Check: Social Media Crisis Management

You also need to remember that unhappy client is your fault and if anything about your service/product/company is wrong, you have to apologize. Even if the reason of dissatisfaction seems exaggerated to you.

Period.

You have to behave like that because people can see opinions about you on your Social Media profiles which work like testimonials. They are more likely to believe opinions written by real customers rather than product descriptions wrote by your marketing department.

Even if the opinion is negative but your reaction is right – meaning you apologized, admitted your mistake and offered compensation like for example one year of free license etc. – you may gain a lot of respect and credibility in the eyes of your potential customers. At the end of the day, we all make mistakes and one stumble doesn’t have to mean that you are fraud.

Thank you for attention and I hope that the above tips will help you eliminate bad habits in social media marketing.