If you want to drive traffic to your website and grow your business, you should be using social media. However, having an unfavorable social media presence can decrease your overall brand perception. Be sure to avoid these social media mistakes if you want to grow your followers and your business.
Focusing on selling
Do you open your mailbox and get excited to see flyers in there? If you’re like most people, you don’t like being sold to. In today’s world, we’re constantly being bombarded with advertisements and brand messages. Even on social media, users’ feeds are broken up by paid ads.
Stand out from the noise and make your brand one worth following by not being overly sales-oriented. Your content should drive value to your users first, like teaching them how to do something or sharing your expert insights on a topic.
If you don’t think your audience would be excited to see your content, it’s not good enough to publish.
Forgetting to add imagery
Millions of posts are made across various social media platforms every single day. If your content is text-only, you’re missing out on a significant opportunity to attract and engage your audience.
You only have a few seconds to catch your audience’s attention long enough to stop them from scrolling right by your post in their crowded feed. Include compelling visuals with every post you publish. Don’t just stop at images. Gifs and videos can also be great ways to engage users. Test out a variety of mediums to see what your audience responds best to. The internet is filled with plenty of images for you to use. Sites like Unsplash have great visuals you can use for free. Or, you could attempt to make your own through software applications like Adobe.
Using hashtags incorrectly
On social media, using hashtags is the best way to reach relevant users who don’t yet follow you. However, using the wrong hashtags can unintentionally associate your account with trends or movements. Always be sure to see what other posts come up for a hashtag you’re considering using. Remember that hashtag use can vary across platforms as well.
Best practices for hashtag quantities also vary by platform. We covered how to find the right hashtags and best practices for each platform in this blog.
Publishing sporadically
All of the social media platforms want both you (the publisher) and your audience (users) to stay on their platform as long as possible. As a result, the feed algorithms tend to reward publishers who share content consistently.
It’s most important to focus on high-quality content. If you can’t create great posts every day, don’t publish that frequently. You have to find a balance you can sustain.
Publishing frequency varies by platform as well. For example, on Twitter, publishing more than ten times per day is great. Alternatively, other platforms would damper your reach for posting so that many times in a day. Check our guide on how often you should post on each social media platform for current best practices.
Not engaging with your audience
The benefit of social media is that you can have a two-way dialogue with your audience. That means when your followers reply to your content, share it, or otherwise interact with you, you need to engage back.
For example, if people ask a question or make a comment, be sure to reply in a timely manner. Be helpful, informative, and don’t forget to maintain your brand voice.
Even if you have negative feedback online, it’s still better to reply than not to. Always remember to be respectful and try to reach an amicable conclusion whenever possible.
Sticking with the status quo
Social media is still relatively new in the grand scheme of sales and marketing. As new platforms come to the market constantly and the way users interact is always evolving, you too need to refresh your strategies.
If you’ve found strategies that work well for you to drive engagement, it can be tempting to stick with what works. While you should absolutely continue to implement strategies that are successful for your business, you also need to incorporate new strategies.
It’s a great idea to regularly test out a few new strategies, media types, messaging, and more. You don’t need to hop on every new social media platform. However, we do recommend investing about 5-10% of your efforts into experimenting with new strategies.
Publishing manually on social media
Between developing content, creating graphics, creating posts to promote it, and actually publishing those posts, social media marketing is incredibly time-consuming. Using a social media scheduling tool can save you tons of valuable time.
Missinglettr isn’t just a social media scheduling tool, we take each new blog post you publish and turn it into a 12-month drip campaign. Learn more and sign up for free here.
