Don’t Make These Common Social Media Marketing Pitfalls This Holiday Season

Since I first started creating social media marketing strategies for clients back in 1998, I’ve seen brands make common mistakes across the social graph. Getting into the holiday spirit, I’ve decided to gift you a few insights that can help you avoid those pitfalls moving into 2019.

The greatest mistake, by far, brands make in social media, is that they do not respect the medium. To this day, many businesses lack a fundamental understanding of social media and how it can be best leveraged (or abused) for marketing. While there has been progress over the past twenty years, including a focus on follower engagement and measurement, there is still plenty of opportunity for improvement.

Below are four of the most common mistakes I still see brands making on social media platforms:

·       Being overly self-promotional or salesy (pushing only products and services)

·       Not segmenting content by audience or platform

·       Not customizing or optimizing social platforms based on features, capabilities, and audience

·       Not creating or tracking key performance metrics to optimize campaign effectiveness

·       Not creating consistent messaging or branding across platforms

·       Not effectively tracking attribution across the social graph

Due to the negative bias of the above mistakes, it is relatively straight forward to address these issues by simply flipping the statement into a positive. For example, Segment your content by audience and/or platform. Here are a few additional tips to make social media successful (beyond marketing) during the holiday season and beyond:

·       Utilize social platforms as a focus group. Listen to your fans and fans of your competitors to tell you how to make a better product or customer experience. While there are tools that can automate listening, don’t discount the value of manual monitoring.

·       Utilize social platforms for customer service, especially during the holidays. There is no more affordable platform for customer service and rarely a bigger opportunity to turn frustrated prospects and customers into evangelists. Just this weekend, I had a Lyft driver cancel my ride only 2 blocks away during a rainstorm. I complained via social media (and through the app) and the Lyft team was highly responsive across multiple channels and resolved my issue in a timely manner.

·       Make your marketing efforts special this holiday season. Provide unique opportunities for discounts during and outside of the primary shopping days. Release unique products or specials to your social followers and incentivize sharing. Don’t forget to utilize hashtags and reference other profiles generously!

·       Become a thought leader. Consider podcasting, vodcasting or blogging during the season as an expert within your industry. Leverage strategic partnerships, influencers and others to get the message out.

·       Don’t forget you can sell via social media. Create deals via shoppable pins, posts, images & videos on Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube and other platforms.

Make the most of your holiday marketing season via social media best practices. Think beyond impressions into engagement, conversations and ultimately, conversions.

Related articles:

9 ways to Lose Friends and Alienate People in Social Media

The 9 Dumbest Ways to Measure Social Media

Social Media (Marketing) Evangelist Job Description

Six Social Media Platforms for B2B Marketing

20 unbreakable rules for social media managers

I hope you appreciate the insights provided in this article, and feel free to add your own social media marketing pitfalls in the comments section below. Happy Holidays!