The only time you have experienced social media is when you use it during your personal free time. But it’s a completely different experience when you actually start managing the social media account yourself.
Chances are you might have made many mistakes without realizing it. Let’s go through some of the mistakes even we might have made in the past.
Not defining your target audience
The major mistake every beginner tends to make is to create a post and caption that is targeted at everyone, yes EVERYONE! FYI this isn’t ideal as not everyone on social media will fit your brand.
I mean if you saw a post that helps with the itch of eczema, and you don’t have eczema, most likely you won’t click on it, right?
Defining who your target audience is will let you concentrate your social media marketing efforts on people who are really really interested in your product and services. If not, no matter how much effort you put into your campaign, you won’t see good results.
A very useful way to find out who your target audience is is by finding out who makes or influences the final purchasing decision. Then from there, you can look at their pain points, what they’re trying to achieve, and their budgets.
You might not discover very specific things about your target audience, but it’s enough for you to know how to craft attention-grabbing captions that can make them read your post.
Recycling content
Have you seen similar content keep repeating itself on Facebook and your first reaction is to ignore it and scroll through?
That’s how your followers feel when you keep recycling content from the past.
A lot of businesses will keep reusing the same form of content that they have posted, and maybe just repackage it a bit with a new caption. Then their followers and engagement rate will slowly decrease over time, and they wonder what went wrong.
Well I mean I get it though. Businesses have to focus on their main work, they don’t always have time to think of content marketing strategies to diversify the stuff they post online.
Sometimes, you just need to do some research on your competitors, and also the current trend on each social media. Then you can mix the content and create something that can fit your business. Let’s say you’re selling baby products, you can post about user-generated content, giveaways, company updates, or even some informational content that is useful for mothers.
If you have the budget, you can consider hiring a dedicated social media marketing agency such as Stelix Media that specializes in producing content for your social media. You can focus on your business while the agency handles everything on social media for you.
Becoming inactive
Another no-no of social media marketing is to become inactive.
We all know there are a lot of businesses out there that have to shut down during the pandemic. And usually how I want to check if they’re still in business is through their social media.
As a business, you might get busy at times and will forget to manage your social media. It’s pretty normal after a long day so why would you still want to manage your social media?
But honestly, it’s important to keep posting on social media to show that you are active. No matter if it’s stories, IGTV, Reels, or any other social media functions available. If people see you haven’t posted in months, you risk losing followers and reducing the trust that social media can provide for your business.
You don’t need to spend many hours every day on social media just to show you are active. Just try your best to update your profile when you can on a regular basis.
Focusing on quantity over quality
Opposite to being inactive, some businesses will spam lots and lots of content on their social media account.
We get it, you have lots of things you can’t wait to share with your audience. But by limiting the amount of content being posted, you will take the most quality content to share with your audience.
It is preferable to devote more time to creating fewer but higher-quality posts for your social media. It may seem counter-intuitive at first, but with so many audiences, the important thing is to create something that stands out and provides value.
Think about it. Is it better to have one post with high engagement rather than five posts with low engagement? They will appreciate it more since they’re being benefitted in this scenario. If you keep posting a lot but don’t contain any quality, they will get annoyed quickly and unfollow your account.
Using the exact same post for each platform
If you have been using many social media platforms, you should know that each platform is special on its own. Each of them has a different tone, content, and serves different audiences.
One size fits all doesn’t exactly work here.
If you post a tweet with hashtags and emojis on LinkedIn, you should prepare yourself that the results won’t be as good as it is on Twitter.
Understanding the foundation of each platform is essential before stepping into that social media.
You’ll make a huge difference with the tone you’re using. If you’re on a professional website such as LinkedIn, its users are mainly professional business people that want to connect with other professionals, instead of finding a post about your product.
Not scheduling content
When you schedule your social media content, you’re allocating time to consider what to post and when the best time to post will be.
Compared to just typing out what you think for an Instagram post on the spot, this should be the standard practice for your social media marketing. You will have more time to consider the words you use and how effective they will be in persuading the reader to take a specific action or engage with your brand.
No one wants to see a social media post that is full of grammatical errors and serves no purpose. To generate the most marketing leads and opportunities for your business, your content must be carefully crafted and not rushed.
What social media managers usually do is that they plan contents worth a month ahead and schedule it for the following month so that they don’t have to do it manually.
You should always make sure you schedule your content on specific dates and times. This saves your time since you don’t have to worry about posting it when
you’re busy.
Conclusion
No need to be ashamed if you made all these mistakes, as we’re all still learning and improving. At one point we will all make mistakes on our social media marketing journey without realizing it. But in the end, if we manage to learn from it, we will gain valuable insights to improve our social media campaign.
