5 Social Media Mistakes You Need to Stop Doing Right Now

By now, every business should have an online presence, however, there’s still a big amount of businesses that do not. If you’re one of those businesses that aren’t currently on social but interested in whether you should take the move or not, then I suggest you get creating those social profiles right after this article!

As we all know, there are a lot of perks of having social profiles for your business. You have more opportunities to connect and build a relationship with your prospects, customers, and those that want to receive the latest news from you. This could be your next sale or even a new product. Other perks include allowing people to contact you directly via social media, offering support to your customers and prospects etc.

Like with most things, when there’s something good involved, then can be something bad or risky. In this case, there are a few risks that you need to be aware of when using social media for your brand. In this article, I’ll be covering 5 mistakes that I’ve seen quite a lot of companies do, and how you can prevent these issues from occurring.

1. Not engaging with your followers.

I’ve seen a large number of company social media accounts ignoring their followers and posting content ignoring those that engage with it. By this, I mean when someone comments on their social post, or even directly tweets them, the company won’t respond and ignore it like as if they hadn’t seen it.

What does this portray to their audience and that specific person? The brand doesn’t engage with their audience and shows they don’t really care much. Some may disagree, but in my opinion, it seems quite ignorant.

If someone comments on your social post saying “Thanks! Nice article, I enjoyed it.” You could at least reply with something along the lines of “Thank you for the comment <Person’s name>, we’re glad you enjoyed it!”. If you wanted to go even further, you could add something else to that like, for example, “We’d love to hear your thoughts on this article? <Link to article>”.

It doesn’t take much to reply to a message/comment, and if you do it right, you may receive more engagement and see your follower/fan base grow, because it shows you engage with your audience.

To engage your followers even more successfully, you can start using a social listening tool like Brand24. It tracks in real time all mentions of predefined keywords relevant to your business. This allows your fast reaction to conversations about your brand even without the official handle. How cool is that? You can give it a free try for two weeks.

2. Only focussing on sales.

Honestly, your followers aren’t following you to be sold to every single post you publish. If they are, you must be doing something amazing. But no, companies that only focus on selling via their social media profiles won’t perform as well as the bigger names out there.

Let’s look at ASOS Menswear Twitter account, straight away their last tweet is a complete guide to coats, which links to their blog. The ASOS Social Media accounts do very well. Why? Because they aren’t selling in every social post they publish. They provide tips, guides, engage with their audience and then, of course, the sales posts every now and then.

There is one thing in common with most of the successful performing brands on social media, and that is the fact they follow the 80/20 rule.

3. You’re on too many social sites.

With the amount of social media platforms out there, it’s almost impossible to be active on every single one. Creating an account on a social media platform and letting it sit there as you no longer use it is a very big mistake. I’ve seen it happen numerous amount of times. It’s not good. Especially if someone goes and leaves negative feedback on it.

In order to prevent this from happening, you need to identify what social media platforms would best suit your audience and then focus on those.

When you have a handful of accounts on various social media platforms, managing them becomes easier.

4. You aren’t posting often.

Not posting often on your social media profiles is also another mistake you want to avoid. I’ve seen accounts, and not just a few, but a large amount that haven’t posted in over 2 months. What does that show? They don’t care much about the networks, their audience, they don’t have time to engage with their fans etc. Not a good look.

You should always make sure your social media profiles are active. There’s an endless amount of ways you can keep them active, sharing your latest blog posts is just one idea…  With the amount of tools out there available to schedule your social posts, there’s no excuse. 

When you start to post more often, you should see your engagement increase, but if you also apply these tips to your Twitter strategy, you’ll see your follower growth skyrocket and potentially even reach over 2 million impressions in a single month like I did.

5. You ignore negative feedback.

If you want to see success on your social media profiles, you’ll need to stop ignoring feedback. Some companies not only ignore negative feedback, but they’ll also ignore good feedback too, which of course, doesn’t give you a good reputation at all. Especially for ignoring negative feedback because that could lead to your company going viral for the wrong reasons.

September 2013, a Twitter user tweeted @BritishAirways a number of times after the person’s luggage was lost. The airline didn’t respond after two days, so therefore the Twitter user decided to promote his own tweet via Twitter Ads. The tweet received over 25,000 impressions. This is why it’s important to always respond to feedback whether it’s positive or negative.

Conclusion:

So, as you can tell, it’s important that you utilize the right social media networks for your business, as this can be a huge benefit for your brand, as you may have gathered. Just be aware of the risks covered.

If you have found this article helpful then please do go ahead and share it! Have any questions? Feel free to tweet me @_GarethG.

Author bio:
Gareth is a versatile digital marketer with experience on various social media platforms including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and many more. Gareth also writes various blog posts like this one. You can follow and stay connected with Gareth on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn.