Social media marketing is a potent marketing tool—nobody can deny that. However, it is also the most oversimplified, uncontrollable, and misunderstood, at least when handled by entrepreneurs or hobbyists who are not aware of the tricks of the trade. Let’s look at some common social media marketing pitfalls that you’d do well to steer around.
Avoid brand identity crises and unguided progress
Social media marketing, primarily through Facebook and Twitter, could backfire if you confuse it with managing a personal social media account. Every one-liner, every story, every snapshot, every contest, every video, and every URL you share on your social media profile is a brick in the wall called a ‘brand.’ Plan a long-term content strategy, and execute it with surgical precision for sustainable branding success with social media platforms.
Equally important to ensuring social media marketing success is measuring results. You can avoid aimless and vain efforts by tracking results. Viewership of your post, demographic break up of your business page followers, number of clicks, number of conversions – all these matters, and you have plugins as well as developers’ tools for Facebook and Twitter to measure, understand, and fine-tune these matrices.
The commonest blunders – content-deprived pages and unheeded customer complaints
It can be tempting to create your business’ very own social media pages for every trending topic of discussion or opportunity for marketing and making news. However, remember that you’ll need to regularly update those pages (all of them). Failing to do so is the metaphorical equivalent of keeping empty containers in your kitchen – your visitors will draw all sorts of unhealthy opinions!
In a similar manner, leaving customer complaints (you’ll certainly get a few) unheeded or inappropriately replied to is going to bite back. The problem is—everyone sees your response, so treat every complaint as an opportunity to showcase how customer-centric your business is by amicably resolving it and making up for any lapse in service delivery.
