5 common social media marketing mistakes

Over 90% of medium and large firms have been using social media in their marketing for quite a few years now . However, according to the CMO Survey, over half of marketers are unable to demonstrate the benefit of their social media spending.

Here are a few social media mistakes that most marketers make.

1.??????The first mistake is to clear goals when choosing a social media channel . Marketers choose a channel, such as Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, and then set targets for increasing the number of likes, comments, and shares on that channel. This method appears to make logic, yet it can trap you in a social media-only mindset. After all, how much is that like, comment, or share worth to your company? ROI can be elusive unless you relate your social media efforts to bigger company goals from the start, and social media becomes an end in itself.

2.??????The second mistake is to confine your brand's social media presence to the most popular or the biggest channels. A multichannel social media approach is frequently required for success. However, the biggest, more popular channel is not always the best for you business and if you go for only those you may be passing up lucrative business chances if you do not use these or other channels, like Quora or Reddit or Discord or Snapchat or Pinterest that may have smaller number but more active users that are of interest to you. ?

3.??????The third mistake is to generate content without properly understanding of your target audience and user person. Either the content will be too product centric / salesy or it will be too generic. I am amazed at the number of business owners I see who are not able to define precisely the user person for their target audience. For example, the user person of someone wanting to buy affordable housing vs someone wanting to buy premium housing can be very different, even though both of them need a house to stay with their family. The car they drive, their income, their online behavioral habits, their challenges in life, their aspirations, the areas they live in, etc ?can be very different and a deep understanding of these will help you craft the right messaging on your social media channels that connects with them and gets them to respond to your messages.

4.??????The fourth mistake is always being in Selling mode. This one is tied to the campaign objectives. ?Everybody wants leads and sales, but sometimes you need to understand the customer journey, that is the customer may go though a number of touch points via multiple channels and different messaging at each touch point to develop trust before transacting with you. Many small businesses, in order to save money, simply want to run a single campaign, that gets them sales or leads, without realizing that without a proper nurturing funnel that reaches out to the customer In their Awareness , Interest , Desire and Action/Transaction journey, you may end up with bad quality leads and / or high cost of customer acquisition. Before you ask for a lead / sale, build trust and credibility.

5.??????Fifth mistake is not defining your success metrics. Closely tied to point number ?4, for each part of your campaign, define specific success metrics and optimize for that. If you are running an awareness campaign, don’t only measure leads, first decrease your cost of reaching as many people as possible, so measure and optimize the cost for reach every 1000 customers . When you ?are trying to create interest in your product, measure engagement metrics. When trying to get them to take action , focus on getting lowest cost for lead acquisition.?You are doing it wrong if you get upset with high cost per lead, when your campaign was optimized for generating awareness and not getting leads.

Having said that, before you even run your first campaign, it’s important to have a proper tracking setup done, to be measure your results, because you can only improve, what you can measure.