The Top 3 Social Media Marketing Sins

• Updated on: 2020-09-08
• Read original article here

49% of entrepreneursuse social media for marketing. Of that number, only 55% are sure that their marketing efforts are successful.

If you’re not sure if social media marketing is working for you, it probably isn’t. 

If you have a robust advertising strategy and a good value proposition, you should see results. While social media users are fickle, they’ll usually respond if they feel advertising is relevant.

That said, it’s easy to make mistakes. Digital marketing is more complicated than it seems. Social media marketing is even more so. In this post, we’ll go through the top three social media marketing sins and what you can do instead. 

Signing up at too many social media sites is a classic mistake that most entrepreneurs make. It’s understandable. It even seems to make sense because it increases your exposure. 

It’s an error because managing several pages is challenging. You’ll have to create compelling posts tailored for each channel regularly. You’ll then need to monitor each page to field questions. Finally, you’ll have to analyze the results and tweak the campaigns accordingly.

Unless you have a professional team to assist you, it’s easy to fall behind. Even if you do keep up, it might be a wasted effort if you select channels that your target audience doesn’t use. 

Start by focusing on one or two social media sites at most. Choose the channels that your target audience is most active on. Look for options that suit the product or service you’re selling. Develop those pages properly before you consider adding more. 

Are you looking for a shortcut? Hire a professional company to handle this for you. You’ll avoid costly marketing mistakes, and get expertly managed pages. 

Again, this is a mistake that many newbies make. It’s due to a misconception that more exposure means more sales. 

Modern consumers face a barrage of advertising daily, and much of it is intrusive. The backlash is that consumers have little or no tolerance for adverts that aren’t relevant to them. 

Trying to appeal to a general audience might land you some clients, but it’s expensive. If you attempt to appeal to everyone, you’ll miss out on qualified leads. An adequately targeted strategy focuses on bringing in qualified leads. You’ll get fewer leads overall, but those you get are more likely to convert. 

Create personas for each of your main subsections of the target market. Identify who they are, what they earn, how they spend their money, and what their pain points are. It’s time-consuming, but the effort pays off.

Different audiences have different interests and needs. For example, a family of four and a single executive have different needs and want very different things from a car. Building one advert that speaks to both is extremely difficult. 

Social media is frustrating. You have to prove that your post is popular to get it seen by more people. That’s difficult when your following is small. To get around this, some entrepreneurs buy followers, likes, and shares. 

For starters, it’s against the rules of all the major sites. If you get caught out, your account will be suspended. You’ll lose all those followers and your legitimate ones.

Initially, the only way to detect fake users was to check every account and the associated followers. Before artificial intelligence, this was too labor-intensive to be effective. Checking one account would take hours. 

With2.7 billion users, manually checking each account on Facebook would be a logistical nightmare. With artificial intelligence, it becomes simple. AI processes big data sets in seconds or minutes, rather than hours and days. Ten years ago, you may have gotten away with fake users. Today, you won’t. 

Aside from the improved policing of the sites, fake users offer little real benefit. The algorithms that social websites use to curate feeds ensure that. Post popularity depends largely on engagement today. Posts that get more likes and shares feature more prominently in feeds. 

Fake followers don’t engage with your post, and so may hurt your chances. If you’ve got 5,000 followers, and only 20 of them like or share what you’re posting, the algorithm may determine that it’s due to the quality of your content. 

Build your following the old-fashioned way by delivering relevant content. Make the posts outstanding so that your users want to share them. Keep the marketing messages down to just one out of five posts. 

For the rest, create content that helps your audience or somehow improves their day. It takes time to build a solid following this way, but there’s no substitute for the results. 

If you’ve made these mistakes, don’t feel bad. Most of us have. What’s important is to move forward with this information. 

Now that you know what not to do, move on to “6 Key Steps to Social Media Success” and learn what you should do.