Social media is a very effective tool for marketers, though, there are plenty examples to be found of businesses and companies who have no idea how to properly maintain their social channels. We’ve listed 10 of the most common social media mistakes, so you can avoid making them yourself.
1. No Plan
Perhaps the most common made social media mistake is when a business has no clear campaign for its social channels. This often results in them sporadically posting a status update on Facebook or a random tweet on Twitter.
Needless to say, this generates less than favorable results. Create goals, make sure you post a couple of times a day and make use of automated scheduling services like Buffer or RSS feed implementations such as IFTTT.
2. Not Being Human (Enough)
Try to keep in mind that when you approach people on social media in a respectful manner, you’re more likely to get a positive response from them. Be nice, courteous and helpful when need be. This is how you effectively build relationships and represent your brand or business in a professional yet down-to-earth way; by putting the “social” back in social media.
3. Not Using Replies
You may or may not be familiar with the dot-reply technique. When responding to a tweet, many people will simply click the reply button and compose their tweet without a second thought. While there’s nothing wrong with this approach, you might be missing out on a great opportunity to share your responses with the rest of your followers.
The difference between a reply and a dot-reply is that regular replies won’t appear in your followers’ timeline feeds while a dot-replies (or mentions) will, making it a great way to share your answers to common questions publicly.
4. Not Using Images (Enough)
However obvious this one may seem, a lot of people tend to forget that including images (especially GIFs) increase the likeliness that your tweet or status update is seen by other people.
Not only that, posts containing images have been proven to have a higher engagement rate than regular posts; people are more likely to share, like or comment on it. This equally applies to the use of Free Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) icons as well as images in JPEG format and other formats tailored to specific social media platforms.
5. Hashtag Illiteracy
#Some #people #just #don’t #know #how #to #use #hashtags and that’s a shame, because when used effectively hashtags will help expose your posts, tweets or status updates to others.
So when should you incorporate hashtags? Twitter has a neat little window in the left-hand side of its dashboard telling you which topics and hashtags are trending right now and we recommend that you partake in at least one of them every couple of days. In doing so, your account is more likely to get seen by people who have never heard of your business before, creating exciting opportunities to engage with new, potential customers.
6. Being Too Personal
Okay, so in point 2 we explained that your company should show some of its “human side” on social media in order to appeal to (potential) customers, however, this shouldn’t be taken to the extreme. Below you can see how Tinder reacted when Vanity Fair published a negative article about their application. Aside from being highly unprofessional, these blunders can result in your company name being seriously damaged.
7. Poor Branding
As with every social media strategy, “consistency” is a keyword here. Your business needs to be easily recognizable across all social media channels, this will vastly improve your brand recognition. We recommend using the same handles on different platforms, if possible and always use the same company header images and logos. People will be able to easily spot your social profiles online this way, which further helps to establish your business as a proper brand online.
Slack changed its logo a lot in a very small time, resulting in inconsistent branding across its social channels.
8. Not Utilizing Automation Software
This might be a touchy subject for some people but in our experience, using automation software to help publish new updates or automate other aspects of your social media channels have proven to be effective in increasing your social reach. Though we do think that automation should be done in moderation, tools like TweetFavy or TwitFox give you control over when and how many engagements you think should be made on a typical day.
9. Fake Followers
Though automation can be a convenient as well as a powerful solution to help improve your online presence, you should never take the easy route and buy fake followers. A lot of websites offer “buy x amount of followers in exchange for x amount of money” solutions as a quick and easy way to boost your number of followers on Twitter, however, these bots won’t interact with you and serve no purpose to the betterment of your profile. Furthermore, anyone with a keen eye will notice that you’ve acquired these followers the “unfair” way, which only makes your business look more unprofessional.
Do try to avoid these!
10. No Maintenance
Perhaps the most obvious tip on this list, but we can’t stress enough how important it is to maintain your social media channels on a daily basis. Make a checklist of what you need to do and queue up some posts every day to ensure your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and/or Google+ pages will be updated every day.
So that’s it; our list of 10 social media mistakes you should avoid making. Of course, using social media is a process of trial and error but with these tips in mind you should be able to avoid making the aforementioned mistakes yourself.
Do you feel as though we’ve missed a crucial tip in our article? Let us know in the comments section below!
Image sources:
http://www.saimgs.com/imglib/other_pages/nonprofit/member-engagement-twitter-industryview-2015/twitter-best-practices.png
http://johnhartstudios.com/bc/2013/01/10/thursday_january_10_2013 /
https://xkcd.com/1646/
AUTHOR: Ailert is the content manager and customer support associate at TweetFavy.com. He’s a video-director, blogger and has an interest in anything social media.
