Stop making these mistakes on social media!

A wise man once said that if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. This couldn’t be truer for a social media manager (getting quite fancy now), or even a small business owner who tries to run an approachable Facebook page. Yet, failing to plan is not the only thing that can get lead to a poor social media page and presence. Here are a few mistakes that you might be making on your platform, deliberately or unintentionally.

Don’t make a promise and not follow it through. Believe me, people will notice that there is no winner to a competition that you held, or that the “winner” doesn’t really exists, or that the product isn’t the same as to the one that was in the competition. If you cannot afford do have a competition, then you shouldn’t do it all.

Failing to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy. Again, and again. Create a goal, set up a strategy and then a schedule. Please take a look at my previous blog posts where I discuss this in detail.

Talking to the wrong Target Audience. Many people will think that this is obvious. Still, several businesses get this wrong. Finding your target market is crucial for any business to survive, but social media can get so cluttered that it can be difficult to find your business target market in social media. If you are targeting women over the age of 50 then you need to know what time of day they are mostly spending time on social media. Get to know your audience in an intense way.

Dealing with Social Media Negative Feedback. This is so important, and should be rule number one in any business, unfortunately many businesses throw it out. Responsibility and accountability is a crucial component. Negative feedback doesn’t have to be negative, you can think about it as to something to change in your business for the better. Don’t delete a post that criticizes your brand, it will come back and bite you in the back. Deal with it, take responsibility, even if the fault wasn’t on your side.

Being faceless. Social media is just that. SOCIAL. Be a brand that gets to know their followers, interact with them. If they send you inbox messages- reply to it, calling them on their name. Nobody likes to be called “dear valued client”, get into their hearts and minds, a place they will remember you by. Position yourself in the market as a brand that knows their clients and not only "value" them.

Spamming. The quickest way for me to dislike a business page is when they spam. This can be usually in the form of tagging people in a post. Don’t be a spammer! Get your content to connect with your audience.

Posting content for the sake of posting content. In addition to the above sentence “get your content to connect with your audience”. Rather don’t post at all as to posting irrelevant information on your page. Find out why they like your page, what grabs their attention and stick with it. You might not get it right away, but track your insights, and after a few months your will see a pattern.

Not Tracking Analytics. One of the benefits of using Social Media for your brand is that you can see the results. At each end-of-month I set up a social media report for the respective client, it is usually a short PowerPoint presentation indicating the performances of the posts. I specify the growth (likes), the best performing posts, the insights I gathered, and next months planning. I tend to keep it simple and client-friendly. To not track your insights can lead to you failing to keep the page running- to see your insights

and growth will motivate you to keep on going!

I hope that this post shed some light as to where you might make mistakes, and hopefully can make them into a right!

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