Social media has been dominating the business world for several years. Whether used as a tool for communication or monitoring customer sentiment, utilizing social media to some capacity in this day and age is commonplace.
According to a Hootsuite and a We Are Social report, there are around 3.028 billion active social media users around the world. That’s a huge market with a lot of business potential.
When leveraged correctly, social media can provide numerous benefits including the increase of website traffic, brand awareness, and the dissemination of important messages. However, when used incorrectly, social media can be a detriment to certain aspects of your brand.
In order to drive more success with your social channels, we’ve compiled the 4 most common mistakes that businesses make on social media and how to overcome them:
Not creating measurable long term goals
Randomly sending out messages and liking other people’s content every now and then isn’t going to build you measurable ROI in the long term. In order to see actionable results, your business should be creating an all encompassing strategy with measurable KPI’s, so you can have visibility into what is working, and what you can do to improve.
The social media strategy you build should encompass realistic long term goals, steps to attain those goals, roles for each member of your team and precautions for situations of escalation. By pumping out content that is in line with your goals, you make for more focused content and a more engaged audience.
Having a strategy in place can also help deter conflict online as it equipes your social media team member with clear steps if there is an upset customer online or if things escalate.
A strategy will also provide a high level view for managers of what employees should be doing with brand-owned accounts. For instance: Guidelines for who they should be monitoring, rules for posting accurate information, the various accounts they can and cannot post on, circumstances where it is appropriate for an employee to pass a comment onto a manger, and so on.
Not enough content
Social media shouldn’t be an afterthought for your brand. You should be providing consistent content that is relevant to your audience, and actively engaging with them. A common mistake businesses make is providing the bare minimum or very little content – assuming that their audience will see it.
People today follow hundreds to thousands of others on social media which means if you aren’t creating a reasonable amount of content, you’ll end up lost in tons of other social messages being curated. Your brand should be pushing out content consistently. By creating a social media strategy, you and your team can set up a schedule for social content to simplify the process.
Inconsistent voice
A frequent mistake that companies unknowingly make is creating disconnect across their various platforms. In order to excel at social media it’s important that you understand your brands voice, what it sounds like, and how you want to convey it across your social channels. Knowing your brand’s voice can help foster relationships with customers online and build a reputable name. Customers can gain a level of trust and predictability with your content.
Once you’ve nailed down your brands voice, it is imperative that you train your team members on properly crafting and executing social media messages. The messages they create should follow a consistent tone and reflect your brands values.
Quantity of social channels over quality
A common mistake for brands is adopting a plethora of social media channels and doing an “okay” job on all of them. Having a social presence is important, but what is more important is the quality of the content you are providing your audiences with. If your pushing out the same “outdated” or “irrelevant” content just to push it out, it’s not going to engage your audience, and your social efforts won’t have a purpose.
Crafting insightful social media messages takes time and strategy. Select a few social channels that you think represent your brand well and create unique and engaging content for them. It will be less time consuming and stressful for your team members and you’ll be on your way to attracting the right people.
Little to no engagement
Engagement is a huge part of the customer experience. How you interact with your customers online directly reflects how customers identify you offline.
In order to properly engage your audience, you should assign roles to team members and ensure that there is a dedicated person monitoring and interacting with your customers. This could mean liking, retweeting or replying to their content. Whatever their responsibility, it is important that they are consistently active.
Further, if a customer is trying to get ahold of you through social it is essential to be notified right away if you want to maintain a solid online reputation. With a platform like Loop, you can engage with customers from multiple social channels on one single unified inbox. In addition, you can use escalations which allow you to auto forward a request or message to another team member if your first-responder is overburdened.
When leveraged correctly, social media can provide numerous benefits including the increase of website traffic, brand awareness, and the dissemination of important messages. By keeping in mind these common mistakes and our ways of avoiding them you’re on your way to driving more success with your social channels.
What are some common mistakes you’ve witnessed on social media? Let us know in the comments or on social media: LinkedIn | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram.
