Biggest Social Media Mistakes – And How To Avoid Them
Across your social media channels, many mistakes are being made — here’s how to avoid them
--
Lack of Analytics Tracking
Although within your content, you can see some insights within your social platforms, ensuring that you set up your tracking within Google Analytics is crucial for future successful campaigns.
Within your campaigns, at each stage of the process, for any links, other placements or materials, if it's possible to be tracked, ensure that you have included UTM tracking to your content.
To be able to gain these links, you can use the UTM Builder to specify the different elements to be placed within the UTM links which are to be placed around your social media posts.
In Google Analytics, the campaigns which you set to your UTM links will correlate within analytics to be able to gain all the insights you need!
This means, that across your direct social media metrics, google analytics and any other 3rd party tools which you use, the usage of these insights into what you have done in the past and the results you got out of it will help you plan for the future — resulting in better results!
Too Much Promotion
When you’re pushing your content onto social media channels, for each stage of it, from the content you post to the links you include, as well as including the self-promotion pieces because you have a conversion objective — you need to ensure you don’t promote too much!
For each post you post which is self-promotional, you should post 3–4 posts that aren’t. Although, of course, in an indirect way you are still promoting yourself. For instance, if you repurpose your content and use information from a blog, for example, this can be used across the social media channels — which will indirectly promote the blog piece.
To conclude in this mistake, ensure that within your copy, you need to have a bit more fun with it, don’t heavily promote yourself, this is because if every post is overly-promotional, it can easily become a spammy page of content that doesn’t help the end-user.
Of course, at the end of the day, they’re the ones converting, so promoting your brand and products are important, but ensure you’re more subtle about it.
Engage In Conversation
One of the biggest factors in social media regardless of whether you’re giving or receiving is engagement.
When you’re distributing content across your social media pages, if you aren't receiving any engagement, mainly comments, they aren’t able to engage in the conversion and you’re posts aren’t going to get mich interaction because of the growth on the algorithm.
The factors of the algorithm are based on many factors on social channels, one of them being engagement. when you finally get your audience to react to your updates, be sure to engage back. A conversation is two-way and needs to be ensured that it is reciprocal.
When you do receive engagement, there is a possibility that some may be negative, however, you should still respond and be sure to respond politely to ensure that you help the customer or potential customer, if they’re yet to purchase from you.
As well, when you’re posting content on your page, it is important to encourage the conversation, ask questions, ask for opinions. Whilst you’re doing this ensure it's all positive!
Not Knowing Your Audience
With the other elements throughout this article, this is by far the most important mistake you need to rectify and improve on. If you don’t know and understand your audience, it's already game over!
To be able to create any single post on social media, or create that big campaign, understanding your audience will ensure you're not shouting into an empty room and gives you the ability to target a specific audience.
In each stage of the campaign, regardless of how much your effort is to create the best campaigns, if you do not know your audience, you will record not the best results.
Especially when you go in the further levels of understanding your audience, with the levels of psychographics, you can understand your audience on an individual level to ensure that you’re targeting properly and being able to create the posts which are performing and convert your audience!
Not Using User-Generated Content
Across the levels of business and throughout the lifetime of the business, there are high chances of you gaining some user-generated content, this enables you to gain content without having to put in any specific work.
When the UGC is displayed via social media, this is a huge element that you can use to grow your brand and overall engagement for your social media channels.
Whether you’re sharing, interacting or engaging with this user-generated content, this is a huge benefit to share this content because it shows a close-ness and closer engagement with your audience on a more intimate level.
For the user-generated content you receive, with the huge push towards stories across the social media channel, sharing visual-based user-generated content across stories can be extremely beneficial towards your brand and content.
Thinking Quantity over Quality
Whether it's an omnichannel campaign or a singular post on one of your social media channels, the ability to increase the quality of your content rather than the quantity is a method that will increase your branding potential.
When you’re distributing content, before you worry about the quantity of which it gets distributed, it is important to ensure it's the highest-quality and informative to the end-user before anything else.
Within your content, if you are sharing or distributing written content which is on your website, there are also algorithmic rules to ensure that the quality of content is the highest it can be.
If it doesn’t help the end-user and customer, it doesn’t help anyone.
Of course, if you’re able to produce high quality which provides the highest level of quality to those who engage with your brand, then gaining the ability to increase quality is crucial also to be able to provide consistency.
This is because consistency helps build your brand further. However, you need to ensure that the quality doesn’t drop because your quantity has grown.
If you want to learn more about marketing, social media, and the strategies, do it stress-free without the paywall — join me on Medium.
Hopefully, this article helped you, or you have learned something new, thanks for reading!
