Did you know that eat healthier, get more exercise and save (more) money were jointly the most common New Year’s resolutions for 2018?
As we start a new year small businesses and entrepreneurs put into place their best-laid plans for the coming year but typically as March to April time-frame rolls around they start to think…. “Why are my plans not really working?”
Can you relate?
If you been doing marketing for a while you know that sometimes the best laid out strategies don’t work as you expect. That’s one of the frustrating things about marketing but on the positive note, you have a strategy which means you can adjust it.
As with social media which is moving at a rapid speed, as well your business and sometimes life we must continue to learn and grow along the way.
So, let’s make sure we put our best foot forward and make sure these top social media mistakes in 2019 happen.
Strategy – Having no strategy is your biggest strategy mistake! Wake up if you haven’t noticed it, we are in 2019. All your competitors are using social media and it’s, getting very competitive out there.
Posting just daily or even regularly is not just the only solution it’s more about consistency but then again that’s not the whole picture.
Building a successful social media strategy might take some time in the beginning but it will be well worth it down the road and you're less likely to waste your time and be turned off from social.
Measuring – Understanding what you’re going to measure is so important as what we measure yesterday as success is not what we measure today. For example, a lot of people get very obsessed with the number of followers they have even to the point they are willing to buy followers. Huge marketing mistake! Now I am not saying you should not measure your follower growth but don’t obsess over it.
thanks, GIPHY
What’s the point of having followers who are not interested in your business. You need to have followers who are interested, engaged with you and who will actually buy from you.
Your metrics need to match not only your overall marketing goals but also your bottom line. If they don’t, why are you bothering?
If we were to take followers as one of our metrics, what does that mean to you? Does that mean more followers = more leads? Or does it lead to more website traffic? If your answer is yes to either or both then this would be a metric worth tracking.
Voice – Earlier we were talking about just posting daily on social wasn’t a strategy. This applies to your messages as well, don’t just post a link, image or a piece without context or caption to it.
Always make sure you have the same voice when posting, especially if you have more than one of you posting to the same social networks.
And of course, don’t bore your followers as they will unfollow you. I promise you that!
There is a reason social media called social! So don’t be boring.
Automation – I can see you rolling your eyes. That’s right you can over automate your social media!
Like a lot of things in life, automation is really great but in moderation's.
Let’s also rewind a little as well to when we said social media is social. That means people are looking for social media channels to be social and be engaging. But using automation tools like bots to automate comments doesn’t bring that authentic engagement and will not help you with the growth of your audience.
Hopefully, we haven’t scared you off of automation.
We see automation being used to schedule your daily/weekly/postings which is a huge time saver and then we like to engage at a personal level with regards to conversations and comments (basically make that a manual process).
Repeat… repeat… repeat – Let me hear you say “I am not going to copy and paste the same message to all my social networks”. Understanding that each social network inner workings and audiences are key and that just taking the same message you created for Twitter for example and posting it to LinkedIn isn’t going to fly. Each social network has a different user experience and by not creating unique messaging for each shows you don’t understand what you’re doing and the audience will notice and more like not engage with you.
The bottom line it’s better to be an expert on less social networks than posting on every social network and not knowing how they work.
If you are focused on the B2B space then LinkedIn and Twitter would be your go-to social networks and then YouTube for videos.
Promotional Content – Stop it now! Just sharing promotional content where you are trying to sell something! It’s a turn-off and your audience doesn’t care.
thanks, GIPHY
From a content standpoint, you should be thinking of what does your audience want to hear about? Most commonly they want to be educated. Example: a common way to engage is through educational content, “How do you save 2 days with Automating inventory tracking”. Another example could be to show your domain expertise in your industry/field.
It’s a balancing act finding and/or building the right content and sharing engaging posts.
Strategy – You’re thinking didn’t we start off with strategy. You would be correct as we did but ignoring your strategy is a mistake and we’ll put our hands up as well to that. We understand as a business suddenly business gets busy and social media takes a back seat and is the last thing on your mind.
Even in those busy periods, you can’t take your foot off the gas with regards to social media. Remember we talked about consistency. Well here we are because at some point business will slow down and you’re be looking for business again and social media is not a tap you can just turn on and off when you feel like it.
Take it from us your social media strategy will continue to grow and forever change as long as you pay attention to it.
And remember a strategy is there to save you time to make sure measure and confirm you're making your goals. If not, adjust the strategy.
As we wrap up there is no perfect social media strategy apart from there are some key elements that are known to work. At the same time, these mistakes should never be part of any successful social media strategy.
Good luck with your 2019 social media strategy