Common Social Media Mistakes Businesses Make and How to Avoid Them

Hopefully congratulations are in order, as if you’re reading this you probably have an active online presence for your business across a number of platforms. However in today’s world being active is simply no longer enough. With more and more competitors also online and an increasing number of channels, tools and fast moving trends, it’s easier than ever to make mistakes in your social media campaigns that could cost you time, engagement and credibility.

However there’s no need to worry as the wide spread adoption of social media means that you can learn from other people’s mistakes. Come with us as we take you on a tour of the most common social issues so that you can learn how to identify and avoid them.

Using exactly the same content across platforms

When it comes to social media marketing not all social media platforms should be treated the same. Business owners and social media managers frequently look for ways to optimise their time and their budgets, for social media marketing this typically is demonstrated by using exactly the same content across multiple social media accounts. When starting a new platform this can be a better option than having multiple blank profiles or even worse not claiming your businesses social platforms at all.

However if you want your social media channels to grow a genuine engaged audience then you need to understand how the platforms differ and how your content creation efforts should be applied across marketing channels. Your social team needs to quickly find out which social media platforms are the right ones for you to concentrate on with unique content as opposed to sharing exactly the same content on every platform.

Little or no strategy

It may sound unbelievable but arguably the most frequent social issues we see on a day to day basis stem with the failure to begin a new social media account or campaign with clear focused social media strategy, for example:

Target audience – Who do you want to reach, what audience considerations are there such as interests, gender age or marital status.

Brand values – How are you planning to demonstrate your brand values through your social media accounts?

Brand identity – How do you want your brand identity being conveyed through your profile and your posts.

Your objectives – What are you hoping to achieve from social media, do you want lead generation or product sales?

Content calendars and content plans – Does this exist already for your business? Can what you have already fuel or feed into your social media plans?

Creating consistent viral content does not happen accidentally. Social media teams around the world work hard to ensure that they have mapped the visual elements of currently trending viral videos and imagery and then immediately incorporate these ideas and themes into their social media content calendar.

Content quality, relevance and frequency

At a time where online visibility is more important than ever and creating AI-generated content is more accessible than ever, the need for quality has never been more important. When we talk about high quality social media content we don’t mean 4k image or video content quality as a lowfi, retro aesthetics are more popular than ever. Instead the measure of quality on your paid and organic social media content is assessed using a number of factors, such as:

Content variation – Are you exploring different image or video content formats based on what’s trending?

User reactions – Is your content getting any audience engagement?

Content ideas – Are they on trend and do they connect with your target audience

Organic user-generated content – The ultimate sign that your content marketing or social media activities are a success is imitation, do you see people taking inspiration from your social media content.

Paid vs organic social media mis-alignment

Lack of consistency and alignment between paid social and organic social media campaigns can impact customer engagement levels. Engagement levels can frequently be overlooked in paid social campaigns as they can be considered as a brand awareness play. Instead focus typically turns to bottom of the funnel metrics like revenue and CPA (cost per application). Ideally all of your marketing channels should have a consistent thread running between them and a clear visual identity, ensuring that not only the brand messaging is consistent but also that the activity is feeding into your overall brand objectives.

An expert TikTok or Facebook ads agency can help you ensure that your paid social messaging and campaign assets align with your organic social strategy. Ensuring that business owners and social media managers don’t have to worry about misalignment between paid and organic social media misalignment.

Customer Feedback & Reputation Management

Whether you receive your customer feedback on an online review platform, directly in your email inbox or via one of your social platforms, how you respond and how quickly you respond is extremely important.

The threat and opportunity of critical feedback

A late or overly emotional reply can negatively impact the growth of your business and your follower count as well as damage your brand reputation and brand loyalty. Customer feedback via a social platform ups the ante as the communication is visible to the whole world and unlike a discreet email, social feedback, positive or negative can generate user reactions.

Responding to negative feedback and crisis communication quickly and professionally should take number one priority, as future customers and followers are watching to get a sense of how they may be treated in the future. Meaning that even if you are dealing with a challenging piece of feedback, there’s an opportunity for you to make it a display of excellent customer service.

The worst case scenario of getting this wrong is having to go through brand rebranding to detach yourself from the negative sentiment of the old brand with negative reviews. A process that’s time consuming and expensive.

On the other hand studies have shown that getting this right can lead to increased brand loyalty and a strong brand identity.

Don’t leave it to chance

Sometimes in the heat of a moment, when you know you are right it’s very easy to share a fiery response online, we’ve all been there. However if you want to ensure your social platforms and your business continue to grow then we recommend setting up crisis management and crisis response protocols. Ensuring that when things inevitably get a little tough you can rely on your crisis management planning to reset your brain and serve up a preplanned action plan.

Over reliance on tools and technology

Social media marketing tools should absolutely be part of your technology stack, however they should support you, not do all of the thinking for you.

Social listening tools

Social listening tools, analytics packages and brand-building tools can lead to misleading insights when data is not complete, inaccurate or taken out of context. They can also lead you to rely on vanity metrics that make you focus on the background noise as opposed to meaning-full insights.

Content schedulers

There are some safer exceptions to the above that many SMMs could not live without, for example content scheduling tools have little chance of damaging your social strategy or feeding you inaccurate insights. However excessive use can result in a feed that is disconnected from current trends and live events, where those that respond quickly or even first have the advantage.

To many tools

It’s very common to see businesses or agencies paying for multiple tools that they end up not using or tools that do very similar if not the same thing. This chips away at your businesses profitability and makes it harder to justify the money and time investment, especially if you have only just started running social media campaigns.

Hacking your way to success

Algorithm hacks are arguably the worst way to try and boost the performance of your social media campaigns. Weather is relying on AI-generated content in the form of fake user comments and engagement or artificially inflating the view counts on your video content. Hacks are generally a short sighted strategy that do not result in sustainable safe growth.

However this does not mean that you can find ways to be more efficient with your time or sparingly use AI-generated content to fill in some of the gaps you may have.