The internet and social media by proxy is potentially the biggest marketing platform available for the foreseeable future. It has a high appeal to marketers because it is convenient and available across the world. On the internet, you can market your brand through social media or by setting up a website.
Social media hosts over 3.5 billion active monthly users who are heavily interested in brand activity. On some platforms, up to 80% of followers follow at least one brand. An estimate places the number of active social media followers who are subscribed to at least one brand at about 2.7 billion users. The interest in brands continues to spike so rapidly that brands are now more popular than celebrities, a trend that looks set to continue for some time.
Not all brands prove to be instant successes. It could take time to achieve your desired goals. It could also be very difficult to attain success with your brand marketing strategy if you fail to set up and follow social media best practices. You could harm your brand’s reputation, which can be a major hurdle to overcome. Many brands have collapsed due to poor social media management, and this could easily be your own if you commit regular and avoidable mistakes. Here are some of the top mistakes that could affect your brand’s level of growth on social media.
Failing to plan
The phrase ‘failing to plan is planning to fail ‘has never been truer than on social media. You will not achieve your expected level of growth by making a few posts and waiting for user interaction levels, as well as other metrics, to spike. You need to invest some time and resource into setting up and operating an ideal social media page for your brand. Planning will help reduce the risk of failure and eliminate mistakes.
Ignoring negative comments
You should not censor your followers through selective user engagement. If you are going to pick and choose between comments, especially where there is bias against negative comments and expressions which may be considered abusive, you will affect user trust levels in your brand. Few people will likely have enough confidence in your brand to make purchases, which could affect your performance. Instead, consider these negative comments as an opportunity to change your followers’ minds and build brand loyalty.
Using one social media platform
You can achieve success on social media even if you will do so through only one platform. However, setting up on a solitary social media page could affect your ability to reach your desired target audience numbers, which may limit the scope of growth. If you do not have enough people to monitor all the platforms for interaction, as well as make regular posts, your page could push away followers instead of attracting them to your brand.
Copying other brands’ successful social media campaigns
Just because a social media marketing campaign has worked in the past, either for you, your competitors or other brands outside your field, doesn’t mean that you should copy it and change a few things to suit your brand. Users may notice similarities and have a bad reaction to your brand’s plagiarizing ways. It could also fail wildly, considering no brand has a similar profile, goals or strategy to your own and the campaign may not be best suited to help you meet your goals.
Failing to assess your capacity
How many people do you have on board? How many social media platforms can they manage between them? What is their turnover time for responses? Does your team need social media training? These are the questions you must ask before setting up your social media page. You will be better able to understand your personal distribution, allowing you to come up with better schedules to cover all social media platforms for efficient and timely responses.
Failing to set up actionable goals
What do you want your brand to gain by going on social media? Understanding how the avenue can be used to help you achieve your goal is crucial, but it is even more important to know what your goals are. Without actionable goals, your brand presence online is devoid of any meaning. You should consider your short and long term business goals, and develop a social media strategy to help you achieve them online. You can get ig views for your video posts to increase visibility on the platform, which could be crucial for growth.
Using vulgar imagery or language
No matter how successful it has been in the past or how suddenly popular it is, you should refrain at all times from using vulgar, offensive and insulting imagery or text. You should not make any attempts to use this type of language or imagery in your content because it carries great potential for a pad reaction, which could have severe consequences. By lacking professionalism in your interaction, even if for humor purposes, you may cause your brand to develop an unshakable bad reputation.
Failing to track analytics
If you do not track analytics, you may have already failed. There are many analytic tracking tools across different social media platforms which will ensure you can monitor the performance of your social media activity to tweak it towards your goals. If you set up actionable goals for your social activity, you could use analytic tracking to observe how users will react to your posts and products, monitor their engagement and interaction with your business, as well as help improve future activity to meet the goals quickly and sufficiently.
Final word
On the internet, your reputation is all you’ve got. If you have set up a business profile, you need to maintain a great reputation to attract followers to your brand. Users will judge your brand by its reputation first and foremost, regardless of your performance in other aspects. While these could come up in their research of your brand and products, a bad reputation will have a negative influence on your brand from the get-go. Internet users joke that ‘the internet never forgets’. With the number of eyes trained on your brand, and with the variety of options available, any mistake on your part could affect your brand’s reputation in ways you may never recover. Instead of waiting for the death knell for your brand, consider setting up social media best practices for your business pages immediately.
