Social media marketing can be a minefield. When done right, it can drive traffic towards your business, yield unprecedented conversion rates, and boost your SEO and audience engagement. However, when done wrong, social media is a huge drain on time and resources and is not at all fruitful. While having social media profiles is a good start, the following mistakes are easily made and can be a huge hindrance to your business.
These are the top 10 social media marketing mistakes to avoid.
1. Failing to Engage with Your Audience
Whenever your customers comment or post on your page, it is essential to respond. Even if they are writing something negative, there should always be a polite professional response to show that you do in fact care about your customers.2. Not Hiring Qualified Professionals
For a relatively low cost you can engage the services of an expert and professional editor for your content writing and proof reading. This can massively boost the quality of your posts, which in turn will drive engagement and SEO. There’s no doubt that search engine crawlers check for spelling and grammar mistakes, so by hiring an editor, you erase any chance of that, and free up time to concentrate on strategy and campaigns.You can place an ad and interview potential candidates with Upwork or Freelancer, where you post the task that you need doing, and then potential candidates apply. This is a great way to create a long term working relationship with the same writer, so the same voice is present across your business. However, some businesses prefer a more automated service, which is fast and efficient, such as Paper Fellows or Big Assignments.
You simply fill in an order form and then your work is assigned to an available expert. A similar approach is followed by Contently, though rather than specializing in writers, this source specializes in content marketing, which ever platform you choose depends on what you are really looking for for your business.
3. Over Selling Yourself
Social media isn’t the place to be too pushy – you can’t just describe how great your business or your product is. Instead, describe how you understand your audience, and how your business can help them.4. Not Utilizing Online Content Marketing Tools
The key ingredient to social media marketing is high quality content. There’s no escaping the fact that every post needs to be well-written and original if it’s going to be successful. Fortunately, for content marketers that are not especially gifted at writing there are several free and easy to use tools available online that can drastically improve your content. The following are essential:Hemingway App – this is a comprehensive spelling and grammar checker that goes into much more detail than anything offered by a word processor. You’ll be advised when your sentences are too long, your structure could be better, and we you’re using too many adverbs or unnecessarily complex vocabulary. This really makes your writing stronger.
Easy Word Count - it’s now a well-acknowledged fact that posts of 1000-1500 words are the best for engagement, and no landing page should ever be less than 300 words. You can use this tool to make sure you stick to your targets, even if you’re writing on a mobile device.
Headline Analyzer - as there are millions of new websites and pages of content posted online every day, it’s not surprising that you need a catchy headline to make sure yours stands out and is appealing to your audience. This tool helps make sure that every title attracts the maximum number of clicks.
5. Posting Too Little or Too Often
There’s a fine balance that you will need to find – you can’t post sporadically or you’ll be overlooked, but you can also lose followers by posting constant meaningless updates.6. Not Monitoring Your Posts
You should be regularly monitoring analytics to check the successes and failures of your posts, so you can learn from mistakes and continue to grow.7. Trying to Use Every Social Media Platform
Facebook and Twitter are important, and potentially LinkedIn for a HR Manager. Outside of that is quite industry specific, but there is definitely no need for a business to try and keep up profiles across every social media platform.8. Being Inconsistent
All of your social media campaigns should have one goal in mind, and every post should contribute to the goal. They shouldn’t be random.9. Not Optimizing Your Content
On Twitter you should use hashtags, on Facebook make sure your location and up to date details are available. Posting generically to each site is not as effective as taking the time to optimize your content.10. Not Being Original
While recycling content every now and again can be a good thing, it should only be your own content, as plagiarism is a huge turn off to many on social media.Avoiding the ten mistakes listed above is simple, and by doing so you can multiply the effects of your future social media marketing.
About the author: Sharon Conwell is a freelance writer, specializing at digital marketing and content optimization; blogger at MyWritingWay.com
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