10 Social Media Mistakes You Must Avoid!

In today’s day and age, businesses that want to succeed usually need to promote their online presence through social media. Even though it might seem simple to create a company profile and keep your followers updated, it’s easy to make social media mistakes that can limit your reach, your engagement, and maybe even your customer base. Read on to learn about 10 common social media mistakes that could be holding back your marketing on social media.

Social Media Mistake #1: Being active on every social media platform

Building and maintaining a social media presence on a new platform takes a lot of time and effort. Think about how much you have to invest to create high-quality content tailored to each platform, and to quickly respond to your followers on each platform.

Prioritize the social media platforms that are most useful for your business. Consider:

·         Are many of the users on this platform part of your target audience?

·         Does the platform provide analytics?

·         Can you expand your reach by using targeted ads?

·         Are you seeing the results that you want?

If you focus only on the few social media platforms that best suit your business, you’ll have more time to create quality content for your best-performing channels.

Social Media Mistake #2: Sharing the same content across platforms

Each social media platform has a different setup and different informal rules, so it is best to customize your content for each separate platform. To increase your engagement and reach, make sure to use strategies specific to each platform. For example, on Twitter, hashtags will help you start discussions and increase your reach – but on LinkedIn,hashtags can come across as unprofessional so it’s better to write in concise, full sentences.

Social Media Mistake #3: Using the wrong image size

Just like you should tailor your writing style to each platform, also make sure each picture and video format is optimized for the platform. Ideally, you want to maximize the space that each visual takes up on your followers’ feeds – so you’ll need to crop and size them to fit the specifications of each separate platform, and consider how they will display on mobile phones as well as computers.

Social Media Mistake #4: Focusing on quantity over quality

Small business owners often don’t have the time to create or curate enough high-quality content to post five times a day on Facebook or tweet 10 times a day on Twitter. By reducing the frequency of your daily posts, you can focus on the quality of the posts rather than the quantity of posts.

Restrict yourself to just a couple of posts per day, and you might find that your reach and engagement actually increases! This limit forces you to only share your very best content, which will resonate with your fans and cause the platform’s algorithm to promote your posts to a wider audience.

Social Media Mistake #5: Ignoring questions on your profile

When a brand doesn’t respond to questions and feedback on social media, the brand tends to lose followers and even customers. It may seem like an obvious solution to simply respond to users who ask questions on your profile, but only 11% of brands actually do this. On the flipside, when brands respond quickly and effectively, evidence shows that users are more likely to use and recommend the brand’s product or service.

Social Media Mistake #6: Sharing links instead of uploading native videos

You can increase your video engagement and reach by uploading videos directly to your social media platform rather than posting a link to a YouTube video. On Facebook, for example, native videos auto-play in users’ newsfeeds, and these videos are displayed much more prominently than YouTube links. This contributes to the much higher viewership and engagement rates for native videos.

Social Media Mistake #7: Promoting posts based on gut feeling

The best posts to spend money promoting or boosting are the ones with the highest chance of success. Although it’s not always clear which posts to choose from just comparing their content, you can use analytics (like Facebook Page Insights or Twitter Analytics) to choose the posts with the highest engagement rate.

Another advantage of this method is that you still lead by creating high-quality content – this way, you only invest in ads to spread top-performing posts even further once you can already identify your best posts.

Social Media Mistake #8: Sharing everything with every audience

Target your content to specific audiences to increase the relevance of your posts. If you have a worldwide following, news of an event you are hosting in New York will probably only appeal to a small portion of your followers, and they are unlikely to engage with your post.

Some social media algorithms even prioritize the better-targeted and more relevant posts – like Facebook, which sorts posts on each user’s newsfeed based on how personally relevant it predicts the post will be to them. That means that good targeting can help you promote your posts above less relevant posts from other brands.

Social Media Mistake #9: Avoiding content from other sources

Although it might seem counter-intuitive to promote other company’s websites and send traffic away from your site, you can actually increase your reach, engagement, and followers by sharing curated content. When you discover and re-share high-quality posts, you market not only to your own followers but also to the followers of those other pages. At the same time, sharing curated content can help make your posts more varied and interesting for your long-term followers as well.

Social Media Mistake #10: Neglecting user-generated content

Curating user-generated content guarantees that the content you share fits the interests of your target audience. By sharing content from people your followers can relate to, you can increase engagement and build the credibility of your brand. Your own customers are best marketers, so give them a voice on your social media profile.