5 Common Social Media Mistakes

To prove how tough it is, I have highlighted five mistakes that you will see every day on social media which are easily solved.

1) What’s the plan? What plan?

If you don’t know where you are heading, how are you going to know when you are getting there? Without a plan before you start posting on social media, it’s going to feel like a lot of hard work. Big gaps between posts (while you’re working out what to do next), and not being able to react quickly to interaction will expose you.

2) Its social media….that’s social media:

A lot of brands use social media as an outbound communication channel. This is using social media, but not being social. Unless you are a news organisation, this tactic does not work. At best it looks like you are disconnected from your audience, and at worst it feels like spamming.

3) No comment…

All brands want to avoid confrontation, and in order to minimise the chance, often no opinions are offered at all. This is a bad move. The top of your organisation will have a view on the stories of the day, and normally sharing these will help consumers engage with your brand. However, use your judgement to know what is shareable and what isn’t – see Chick-Fil-A.

4) Don’t ABC – ‘Always Be Closing’:

Every brand will want to measure their ROI from social media. And the temptation is to sell, sell, sell. But social media is all about building and developing relationships, so that’s where your focus should be. Nothing wrong with the odd sales message, but don’t lose your focus from developing the relationship.

5) What’s a metric?:

Although you can’t see this externally, it is pretty clear which brands have metrics in place. You should be tracking the level of sentiment, the number of referrals to your website and linking social media to your CRM system to understand what value social media is adding to your business. If you’re not tracking this (and more), you won’t know if social is working for you.

Most of these mistakes are fairly straightforward to solve, and even if it takes some time, avoiding these mistakes will put you ahead of a lot of other brands on social media!

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