Social media presents marketers with an incredible opportunity to gain insights about their customers and competitors. It has forever changed the not only digital marketing, but marketing in general.
If care is not taken however, one can easily become obsessed with chasing after fans and followers without truly accomplishing anything which benefits your company as a whole. There are mistakes that many digital marketers make when it comes to this area.
Let’s explore some of them.
#1. Using the wrong metrics
Many conventional marketers use the number of fans or followers that their efforts have gained for the company as the primary yardstick by which to measure their success.
In truth, though, it doesn’t matter too much how large a social footprint you have. You could have thousands of Facebook fans without it making a difference to your business. In social media, what matters is how much people feel compelled to talk about your business by tweeting about it, bringing your business up on Facebook and sharing your videos among their friends.
Businesses that truly understand social media marketing use metrics that make sense for social media. They measure brand sentiment, the number of times their customers share their experience with the company’s customer service department and so on.
#2. Setting up too many social network accounts
If you’re in a large organization where most of your managers have a company-branded Twitter presence, each one with its own handle, people who wish to follow your company on Twitter will have no idea which one of these is the real one.
Managing one social media business account properly can be a huge responsibility by itself. Even large companies often have trouble adequately staffing and running a lone Facebook account. Many small businesses, though, make the mistake of jumping headfirst into every social media platform, major and minor – Google+, Pinterest, Vine, Tumblr and FourSquare, among others.
They only think of how they are stretched too thin after they’ve set up pages everywhere and got a handful of fans. They are then forced to abandon many networks and lose face. The lesson to learn here is that no small business has the resources to run more than one or two social networking accounts.
#3. Making your social presence all about you
Just as no one likes to be around a person who just likes to talk about himself, no one likes hanging around the Facebook page of a brand that can’t get enough of itself.
Brands that have no idea how social networking works jump in thinking that it’s a traditional advertising platform. All they ever give their followers are advertisements, unimpressive discounts to buy stuff with and worst of all, boring content.
If you are going to get your business on a social network, you should concentrate on finding out what kind of content your customer base is interested in and invest in high quality content creation to meet this need.
Some businesses manage to be unsuccessful without making any of these mistakes. This can come from unwillingness to try anything new. The most important thing with putting your business on a social network is to be engaged and to constantly try to find a way to reach out to your customer base and be relevant to them.
What other common social media marketing mistakes do you know of?
