Social Media Mistakes That you Might be Doing
The popularity of social media is increasing every day. Everyone wants to jump onto the bandwagon and as a business, you want to build a strong social media presence. There is one main reason to this and that is because that’s where the audience is!
There is however some things that you should avoid doing on social media, no matter if you are running a business account or a personal account.
Everyone makes mistakes even your most experienced social media manager, that is why, in this article, we’ll be writing about Social Media Mistakes That you Might be Doing so you can avoid doing them into future and improve your social media game.
1. Not posting consistently
If you are looking to build your brand, image and social media presence, then you need to be posting consistently on social media. If you aren’t able to post all the time, you should at least engage with your audience and let them know that you are still around.
The best however, is that you are putting up high-quality content, consistently. The ultimate amount of posts per day that you should post varies between different social media platforms but you should aim on keeping your followers updated at least once a day. Preferably more.
The reasons to why you should post often and a lot are many and one of them is that if you don’t post content consistently, you aren’t reminding your audience that you exist. As a brand and business, this is extremely important because a simple thing as a post can make the customer think of your business or a specific product all day or at least a short while. Unconsciously, you are putting your business on people’s minds with a simple post! Why wouldn’t you want to have a consistent social media presence?
Another thing is that if you stop posting for a while, let’s say a month, it sends out signals that you have quit with the platform. This means that people will unfollow you because why would anyone want to follow an account that doesn’t share any content? It also means that new people who find your account might not want to start follow you, even if they like what you have posted so far because you won’t post any new content. Everything together, it means that your account will grow very slowly, or even worse, lose followers.
2. No strategy
Social media is all about strategy. Even if you might not think that. You can see very clearly that some big accounts such as Nike and Gucci have taken this very seriously and when you visit their accounts, you can almost feel how the accounts are built with strong, solid strategies with everything thought of. But then again, they spend millions of dollars on their social media strategies.
Even if you might not be able to put that kind of money into your social media strategy, you can still create a fairly successful one with just your time and some work.
Set up a clear strategy with goals and plans to make the chance of a social media success to be as good as possible. Write your goals and expectations with social media down. Think about what you need to do to reach those goals and how you can improve the chance of success and rapid growth.
By writing down what you want to achieve, you make it more clear what needs to be done in order to get there. Simply think about what you want to achieve and then execute!
3. Focusing on too many platforms
There is nothing wrong with having many social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest all at the same time- as long as you have the opportunity of running them in a good way.
If you don’t have the resources of running many social media platforms at once, you shouldn’t either. All too many businesses thinks that creating an account and posting a few pictures and then letting the account be will make all the work but unfortunately, this isn’t the case. If your resources are limited, you should focus on a few (or even one) social media platform and do your absolute best to rule that platform.
This is just like anything else. If you are trying to build three house at the same time, the time it takes to build them will be increased dramatically and the chances that the results will be as good as if you would have focused on just one will be very low. The same goes for social media.
If you instead focus on one platform(or a few if you can), you can put all your energy into that and make sure that you get the best results possible. It is better to have one account with a lot of followers and a strong presence than many accounts with few followers and a very inconsistent content posting. When you’re everywhere, you have no focus.
4. Buying fake followers
This is unfortunately not uncommon and all too many businesses are doing this in the belief that it will help their business. The truth is that it does the opposite.
It is easy to fall for the “10K followers for just $50 dollars?! Awesome”. That is only one truth to it though. At first, buying fake followers can seem like a good idea in order to build a strong image and make it look like a lot of people are interested in your business.
However, after a while, you will soon notice that you are constantly losing followers and this will have a negative effect on your brand’s image. The reason to why you will lose followers is because the followers that you get when you are buying fake followers is fake. Straight off bots. Instagram does not allow bots and fake account on their platform and they are working very hard to keep their community clean.
This means that the followers that you bought will slowly but surely start to fade away when they get banned or unfollow you. One thing is for sure, the fake followers aren’t there to stay.
Compared to real followers, there is no one behind the account, meaning that the fake followers aren’t genuinely interested in your account. Real followers that choose to follow you is however.
You might have heard about the companies that are saying that they provide REAL followers but this isn’t true. Buying followers is not allowed by Instagram and the followers you buy from these sites are nothing but bogus so stay away from them and try to build your audience in a genuine way,
5. Not engaging with your audience
On social media, your audience is all you have and you should treat them like it also. An engaged audience is super important on social media and the opposite to the headline above is the main key to obtaining this.
By engaging with your audience, asking for their opinion, answering their questions and showing your gratitude towards them, you are creating a connection and trust between you and your followers. Trust is the single most important thing when you want to sell something. By creating trust, you can make it more easy to sell things through your social media, and I can guarantee that you will increase your sales if you do this correctly.
What about you?
We are curious to hear about your stories! Have you committed any of these 5 common social media mistakes? Let us know in the comment section below!
