Social Media Marketing Mistakes That Could Hurt Your Business

In our tech-driven world, we’re living the majority of our lives online. In fact, a new report found that consumers spend more than four hours per day using smartphone apps on average.

That’s welcome news for businesses that are looking to reach new customers. Now that mobile traffic now represents more than half of all web traffic, according to Think With Google, there’s arguably never been a better time to get active on social media and make connections with shoppers.

As such, social media marketing has become an integral part of brand promotion. But that doesn’t mean it’s foolproof.

If you aren’t careful, you could make some critical mistakes with your social media marketing. Here are just a few of those mistakes you should avoid to ensure your marketing efforts go off without a hitch.

MISTAKE: Posting Without a Strategy

If you want your business to be profitable, you need a solid game plan.

That means you can’t simply “wing it” with any of your marketing. Nor can you post for the sake of posting. Instead, you need a well-developed content marketing strategy.

Having a content strategy for your business can allow you to determine what, when, and where to post for maximum value.

Rather than publishing a new blog or Facebook post whenever you remember, you should map out your goals and figure out how to achieve those goals with your content creation and distribution.

Without an overarching strategy, your content simply won’t resonate with your audience. It’ll confuse them and provide little to no value for them.

In the end, that means your followers won’t click, share, or make a purchase. They’ll just scroll on by.

You should have a strategy for all of your content marketing efforts, but it’s particularly important for social media.

Backlinko reports that 3.96 billion people now use social media on a global scale, with 70% of the U.S. population saying they have social network accounts.

And since a staggering 90% of people buy products or services from brands they follow on social media, it’s crucial that businesses leverage the power of social.

You can only do that, however, if you establish and follow the right roadmap.

Posting without a strategy will lead to inconsistency, a lack of direction, and poor performance monitoring.

We know that social media algorithms like accounts that post regularly. You also need to provide value to customers each and every time you post if you want to appear in their feeds more frequently.

Failing to start (or refer back to) a strategy will result in content that doesn’t align with your goals. Your posts may be too infrequent, out of sync with your brand voice, or won’t prompt followers to engage.

Before you get on Instagram or LinkedIn and start posting, you need to devise your strategy first. Really hone in on your goals, research the best platforms for your brand, and come up with a system that helps you achieve your aims consistently.

MISTAKE: Forgetting to Engage With Your Audience

The allure of social media can all be traced back to the concept of connection. This is, after all, why social networking sites were developed in the first place!

These platforms provide a way to build relationships and share information from afar. Whether you’re catching up with a lifelong friend or you want to learn more about a product, social media provides you with endless opportunities to get what you’re looking for.

In other words, coming up with valuable content to post is only part of the equation. You’ll also need to work on audience interaction if you want to build your following, boost your brand perception, and drive traffic to your website.

Because the market is so saturated, you’ll need more than a top-tier product or service to make an impact on buyers. You’ll need to show them what makes your brand different from the others – and that involves some level of personalization.

Basically, you’ll have to demonstrate what your brand is all about and why customers should care. Leading with your values is a great way to get the conversation going – but you can’t just post and peace out.

Instead, you’ll need to become an active participant in the discussion. In general, that means your brand should feel accessible to your followers. You’ll have to respond thoughtfully to comments and direct messages of all kinds. Ignoring these interactions (or just responding with a “like” or an emoji) isn’t really going to cut it.

Customers want to know that they’re being heard. Whether they have a legitimate concern or they simply want to tell you how much they love your brand, you need to be available to and engaged with them. If you aren’t, chances are that consumers will look elsewhere for solutions.

By remembering to connect with your customers on social media, you’ll make the most of your efforts and improve your overall brand perception on a consistent basis.

MISTAKE: Responding in Anger or Panic

We mentioned above how crucial it is that you engage with your audience. There is, however, an exception to this rule – and it’s when you can’t keep your emotions in check.

Whether you’re the newest hire or the CEO, you’re a representative of your brand. And that means you can’t afford to let your feelings get the best of you.

It’s natural that you might become defensive if a follower criticizes your brand or tags you in a post that could have major implications for your reputation. Because social media is so powerful, these events can quickly spiral out of control – particularly if your response is off-the-cuff and less than calm and collected.

While you should aim to respond to comments, tags, direct messages, and the like as soon as possible, that doesn’t mean you should always rush to respond. You should establish a process for dealing with customer service inquiries or PR problems and make sure your team is on the same page about how to handle issues that will inevitably come up.

In the end, you should lead with empathy and never let your followers see you sweat. Staying silent isn’t an option with ethical issues, but you should also resist the urge to respond right away to defend yourself.

And if you do mess up, don’t blame the intern. In fact, don’t pass the buck at all. Even if there’s some truth to it, customers want to see accountability from brands.

MISTAKE: Dismissing the Power of Ads

Digital ads play a major role in today’s marketing campaigns. But if you’re currently sticking to PPC ads or website display ads, you might not realize what social media advertising can do for your business.

According to HootSuite, social media ad spend was predicted to increase by 20% in 2020, reaching an estimated $43 billion. And while costs are down, impressions are high. Around one-fifth of customers say they discover new brands and products through paid ads on social media platforms.

That’s not to say that every social media ad is successful. Bad social media ads can do a lot of reputational harm. But if you stay away from this opportunity altogether, you’ll be missing out – especially because platforms like Instagram are becoming increasingly brand-centric.

If you get it right, you can reach new demographics and leverage these powerful platforms to your brand’s benefit.

Avoid These Missteps and Make the Most of Social Media Marketing

Social media is always evolving, which makes your job even more difficult as a marketer or business owner. But if you’re able to prevent these problems before they happen, you’ll get more out of your marketing efforts and become a brand to watch (for all the right reasons!) on social.

A Perfect Guide To Measure Social Media Marketing Campaigns

Now, social media platforms allow you to extend your reach within a vast audience base. Yet, brand experts target a massive audience through TikTok content. But when measuring the TikTok campaigns, several more factors come into the picture. The estimation of social media campaigns not only knows how good your post works. But also know the improving factors on your strategies and where your brand pushes. Anyhow, going through the numbers and modifying them on a regular basis gets you to figure out the stats. Digital marketing focuses on business development to expand audiences. Therefore, social media methods play a significant role in generating effective results for every campaign on unique tactics with particular insights.

This article explains everything about measuring social media marketing campaigns using practical guides. Let us kickstart with the estimating insights of social media marketing campaigns.

Simple Steps To Measure Social Media Marketing Campaigns

1. Recognize Your Social Media Marketing Targets

Whatever be the size of your business or brand target on your social media marketing. Driving website traffic, getting new audiences, gaining audience feedback, and much more. First, you need to find your target. With aiming insights, you can plan the metrics you need to check. Know how your campaigns offer your outcomes as it will plan which metrics you can check.

2. Remember Strategies To Measure Social Media Platforms

The metrics vary depending on the social media platforms you are evaluating. In contrast, look at the metrics of likes, comments, and shares, where one must know their social media. Make sure you start your account using social media platforms. The social media campaigns with engaging content metrics estimate the results. If your tactics work on one platform, they will not work on every other social media platform. So, know your audience on a specific platform by remembering your campaign’s target. Then establish the outcome analysis. After this, you can enhance your user interaction on social media platforms. For example, you can boost TikTok’s presence to find the best place to buy TikTok views to improve viewer’s engagement.

3. Start Estimating The Metrics

Understand the performance of your campaign’s profit while comparing your earlier campaigns. Once you check the metrics, make sure to compare them with your previous posts. Look at which method works better, which will also help you know what you should work on.

4. Analyze Your Metrics Report With Previous Campaigns

Understand the performance of your campaigns. But you can get the result only when you compare it with earlier campaigns. So once you watch the metrics, make sure to compare them with your previous posts. Also, start to look at which method works better on social media campaign monitoring. It will also help you know what works for your social media profile.

5. Understand Your Competitors

Estimating your social media marketing campaigns can be helpful. Start to examine your results with your competitors. With these analyses, you can craft more excellent strategies soon. It also permits you to look at how other brands make effective results for social media tactics. Brand experts can choose a competitor checking tool to test. Finally, beat your competitors on social media platforms by Trollishly that drives your website traffic. These steps, as mentioned earlier, offer you a systematized analysis of how your brand performs on platforms.

Standards To Measure Social Media Marketing Campaigns

1. Standards To Check Brand Awareness

Are you trying to improve your brand awareness on social media marketing? In that case, it is OK to craft your post with visibility among several audiences. Check out the following objectives for brand awareness: Impressions, Reach, plus Follower growth.

Pro Tip: Do social media marketing on the TikTok platform to increase your brand awareness. Then start to use Trollishly that pulls the attention of followers.

2. Determine Engagement Rate Of Social Campaigns

Every social media platform has got its standards for evaluating the engagement rate. It will show you how the audience is elevating the content. For your social media posts, estimate the engagement factor of your campaign’s post. You can check the engagement rate using likes, comments, shares, retweets, and mentions.

3. Check Your Website Traffic

Brands use social media marketing campaigns to improve their website traffic. It is significant for brands that post. Also, businesses make their audience see the new collection of products and services. It helps to check your website traffic by the number of clicks on the link. While comparing the link clicks for the post’s views, you will know how many viewers clicked.

Things To Remember

In a nutshell, this article, A Perfect Guide To Measure Social Media Campaigns, helps check your performance. Looking at audiences and their quality manages you with the engagement rate. Then the practical step is to do your social media marketing goals. Finally, it helps to craft up unique content that brings closer to realistic objectives.

Brands With the Most Brilliant Social Media Marketing Campaigns

Major brands depend hugely on social media campaign engagement to raise brand awareness and generate more traffic.

Brilliant social media marketing campaigns by famous brands

LUSH – user generated content

LUSH uses UGC, or user generated content to make its social media presence more appealing and noticeable. It does this by creating a whole community-like feeling on its Instagram, allowing its followers and customers to post their pictures with the products, along with LUSH hashtags to get featured on their brand’s main page. It refers to its community as “LUSHIES”, and there are a bunch of hashtags people use, the most popular of which is the #lushcommunity hashtag.

This is a very cost-friendly approach, where the brand itself has to spend almost nothing to create engagement on its social media. All it needs to do is repost from a customer’s post, and they become the talk of the town. Larger quantity and variety of content can mean greater engagement for your social media pages. LUSH is achieving this by using UGC. Another benefit of UGC is that flowers or customers feel more personal with a brand. They get a great value for their purchase and are most likely to remain loyal to a brand too.

Gillette – video content

One way of effective digital marketing is using video content and publishing it on digital platforms like YouTube and Facebook. One popular brand that jumped on the bandwagon is Gillette. The brand took a very smart decision, and wisely picked its timing and context for the campaign. In the midst of all the gender equality rage and social media discourse about women empowerment and feminism, Gillete knew how to become a huge part of all this.

The P&G personal care brand released a short film on its YouTube channel in 2019. The short film was titled “The best a man can be”, which is a revamp of their original tagline “the best a man can get”. It targets the concept of toxic masculinity and how men can do better in today’s age and time for themselves as well as the women around them.

The short film shows different men struggling with various stereotypes linked to masculinity such as the fear of showing emotions, the silence about sexual harassment and much more. All the toxic masculinity traits that are glorified in male-grooming products, including Gillete’s past ads itself, gave the brand a whole new look. Its audience got a new perspective, and it became the talk of the town and sparked conversation about its campaign. All of this was a result of posting a short film on only one social media platform: YouTube.

MoonPie – humorous approach

A brand’s number of followers alone do not indicate anything about its position in the digital marketing world. However, with the right approach and well-thought social media marketing strategies, brands like MoonPie have been able to see significant boost in their following within a matter months.

MoonPie basically targeted its Twitter account towards young adults, and teens, by becoming a complete “meme material”. Its witty replies and Tweets became trending topics on Twitter in no time. The company itself is hundred years old, but knows how important it is to adapt to this digital transformation and need of the hour.

The brand did not focus its efforts into revamping its products or altering its TV commercials. All it did was give the brand a character, and make it look like an actual person communicating and connecting with others via Twitter. We have seen many brands use the “character” approach, such as the Tiger named Tony in Frosties. MoonPie’s brand character is witty, weird, funny and sarcastic. Its Tweets are also up-to-date with all trending memes. You will also find consistency in its Twitter to keep their audience engaged.

Dove – portraying brand values

Since more than a decade, Dove has established itself as a brand that encourages and endorses natural beauty and inclusivity. It was already promoting self-love and acceptance of different types of people long before social media became the main platform for such topics.

Like LUSH, Dove also used UGC to generate traffic and engagement with their digital presence. It did this by creating a whole “photo gallery” under the Project #ShowUs, where women would share their pictures shattering stereotypical beauty standards and expectations. Women of color, women with facial scars, plus size bodies, body hair, in odd professions and physical disabilities and much more do not get enough representation in advertising. This was Dove’s way of connecting with its audience and building a highly positive and healthy community.

Spotify – triggering FOMO

We all know about the increasing issue of FOMO (fear of missing out) in young adults and teens as they include more and more of social media in their lives. People are constantly feeling the need to hop on to any trend without properly assessing the context, need, and practicality of the trend just so they don’t miss out or “lag behind”.

FOMO is a legitimate psychological state people often find themselves in and Spotify successfully tapped into this area. It took charge of the situation and diverted its social media campaign on this particular trigger. Their “AllYearsWrapped” is a social media campaign that gives their subscribers a review, or more like a journey through the music listening habits throughout the year. Once a user takes a look at their music listening journey all throughout the year compiled together, they can also share it with their friends and followers through social media stories.

This shows how efficiently Spotify made use of its users; data and let it benefit, and give a valuable experience to its users. The “Wrapped Playlists” have become so popular because of the personalization it provides to its users, allowing more users to engage with the app and have something to look forward to.

End note

The involvement and dependence on social media makes it inevitable for brands to use these platforms and engage with their targeted audience. Even if you are a new start up, a well-established brand working in the industry since years, you will still need the help of social media marketing to make it through. Make use of Mediacom internet packages to get connected with your fans and potential customers all around the world. The internet has no limits, and lets you take your marketing campaigns to a larger level that was not possible before digital transformation.