Social media marketing is a potent marketing tool – nobody can deny that. However, social media marketing 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 see some common social media marketing pitfalls that you’d do well to steer around.
Avoid brand identity crises and unguided progress
Social media marketing, especially through Facebook and Twitter, could backfire if you confuse it with the management of 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 ‘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 matter, 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 of marketing and making news. However, remember that you’ll need to regularly update those pages (all of them). Failing to do is the metaphorical equivalent of keeping empty containers in your kitchen – your visitors are going to draw all sorts of unhealthy opinions!
In a similar manner, leaving customer complaints (you’ll certainly get a few) unheeded, or inappropriately replied is going to bite back. The problem is – everyone sees your response, so treat every complaint as an opportunity of showcasing how customer centric your business is, by amicably resolving it and making up for any lapse in service delivery.
