Harmful Social Media Mistakes and How to Fix Them

Social media is a powerful marketing and branding tool used by businesses to connect and engage with their target audience. It’s great for brand exposure, generating inbound traffic and establishing an authoritative online presence.

And with over 3 billion active social media users worldwide and 79% of Australians present on social media, it’s a good place to unleash your marketing efforts.

But are you really doing everything you can to maximise your social media performance or have you reached a plateau?  With trends and algorithms coming and going, it’s not unusual for businesses to commit a number of social media mistakes – most of the time unwittingly.

So take a look at the most harmful social media mistakes, find out if you’re making them and see how you can fix them.

Ignoring the Analytics

A common and hazardous mistake you can make on social media is failing to measure your metrics. This includes everything from tracking and measuring your reach, engagement and conversions to monitoring your competitors and mentions. Keeping tabs on your social media analytics will give you a clearer idea of what works best for your business. Ultimately, this data will help you plan, revise, and improve your social media marketing strategy.

How to fix it: First of all, you should establish your social media goals. Namely, do you want to measure brand awareness (reach), engagement (clicks, likes, comments, and shares) or conversions (various actions)? Once you do,you can monitor your performance on each platform separately.

Having Slow Response Rates

What’s the point of having a social media page, if you’re not active on it? Quite frankly, not much, especially when one of the most important aspects of online branding is to engage with audiences. So if your followers have to wait hours or days to get a response from you, this can be harmful to your overall brand image.

According to research from Lithium Technologies, 53% of Twitter users expect brands to get back to their queries in less than an hour, while 60% will take unpleasant actions if these expectations aren’t met.

How to fix it: Make sure you communicate with your audience regularly and respond to their comments and messages in a timely manner. Also, if you have multiple people managing your social media accounts, develop a plan to ensure responses are cohesive. A great way to do this is by creating templated responses.

Focusing on Quantity Instead of Quality

Whoever was first to say quality over quantity sure knew what they were talking about. However, these wise words of advice are easy to forget, particularly in marketing. Many businesses and marketers make the mistake of posting content multiple times throughout the day. As a result, your content may come across as spam and cause people to hide your posts or unfollow your page. After all, no one likes seeing too much of a brand on their homepage, even if it’s their favourite. Therefore, when you do post, make it count.

Additionally, high-quality posts get more engagement from your audience; shares, likes, comments, you name it. Rather than posting ten times a day, cut down to just one or two posts a day (or you can skip a day depending on the platform). Then check your social media analytics to see if there’s a difference in engagement levels.

How to fix it: Create a social media calendar to plan your posts. By reducing the number of times you post, you will have more time to sift through your content and choose posts that will offer the most value to your audience. 

Giving Up on Social Media

This is probably the biggest mistake you can make – and you’ll definitely come to regret it. Why? Well, because social media offers many benefits that will help your business thrive. For instance, you gain valuable customer insights, increase brand awareness, drive traffic to your website, monitor competitors and build relationships with your target audience.

In fact, 92% of marketers agree that social media is fundamental to their business. Therefore, if you’re not seeing any positive results from your time spent on social media, then the problem isn’t with the platforms, it’s with your approach.

How to fix it: It’s okay to ask for help from other social media specialists. Read blogs, guides, ebooks and watch video tutorials to find out the very basics of social media marketing.

Back to the Drawing Board, Maybe?

Are you a culprit of these harmful social media mistakes? If the answer is yes, then your social media strategy could use a reboot – like now. Steer clear of these four harmful social media mistakes and enjoy the fruits of your marketing efforts.