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6 Social Media Marketing Mistakes to Avoid (and How to Fix Them)

Social Media is fun.

Whether your favorite platform is Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, you’re constantly fighting with temptation to check out your feed all day.

New followers, cool new sneakers or latest gadget.. it’s just hard to resist.

From average user perspective, it’s just fun.

But from business perspective, the story is different and learning how to navigate through the busy feeds can get a little bit tricky at times.

With popularity of online shopping on the rise, Social Media Marketing has become an integral part of online marketing landscape.

As cutting through the social media noise has become increasingly more difficult, marketers are trying to do anything to gain the edge and also make things happen so fast. As such, you see many Internet Marketing blunders businesses make.

But don’t worry. These Social Media Marketing mistakes I am going to show you here are pretty common and they can easily be fixed.

1. Not Optimizing Your Profile and Image

This seems very basic, but it’s deceptively difficult.

I hear you saying, “I am not good at this.”

Should I present a fun kind of image?

Serious, professional or cool?

Professional, yet fun?

I know you keep doing this in your head and it never ends. So, what should you do?

Solution

Digital marketing expert Neil Patel tells us that you should avoid being predictable. If you happen to be a coffee addict and movie aficionado, you might want to listen to what he has to say.

Here are the 7 ingredients of a great Twitter bio that he thinks will make you look more professional… and maybe cool, too!

2. Not Setting a Target Audience

Just like any business built with the target demographics in mind, you build your social media following with the right audience in mind so that you can drive traffic into your sales funnel.

Is your tactic just follow as many relevant people as possible hoping they will follow back? It may work but I don’t think it’s all that effective.

I read some people saying that on Twitter only 25% of people who you followed will follow you back. But that’s by following random people and probably they just returned the favor.

Whether doing it manually or by automation, bulk-following is not worth the effort and it makes you look like you are desperately trying to bump up the number of followers.

Solution

The best thing you can do to connect with the relevant people – whether your competitors or customers – is always publish quality posts relevant to your audience.

If you are publishing quality posts/tweeting regularly, people will see what you are doing and you will naturally attract quality people.

Even with that method, there are always users who will unfollow you after a few days you followed back.

If you have time to be counting the number of followers – I admit I still do though – it’s better to spend time creating content or reading articles by other people and share them.

Let your content do the talking.

If you retweet with @username, your tweet will gain more exposure, too.

3. Not Having a Blog/Not Actively Blogging

If you don’t have a blog, these stats can convince you to start one or be more active.

According to HubSpot
, 78% of Internet users conduct product research online.

The same stats tell you that companies that blog get 55% more web traffic.

In an age when nearly half of the world’s population is using the Internet, not having a website is like leaving a lot of money on the table.

You are on social media to meet potential customers or other peers in the same industry.

And your website is a space to let people know about you and how your business can help people solve problems.

Without a website, attracting potential customers is a challenge. Anybody can open social media accounts, and if that is your online presence, you will not earn the trust of consumers.

Also, if you’re not actively blogging, it’s hard to be visible in Google.

Solution

Although blogging can be time-consuming, it doesn’t cost much to start a blog today. So, start learning how to start a blog.

Not only having a blog increases trust, it will increase your followers on social media. So, the more active you are blogging, the more good things are going to happen.
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4. Not Having Specific Goals and Sense of Purpose

Not everyone is on social media for business. A lot of people are there to just hang out and have fun.

So, you really need to work hard to get attention in such a noisy space. If you are there without sense of purpose, it’s easy to get sidetracked and lose focus.

As a business owner, you need to operate with clear goals in mind on a daily basis.

Do you have a holiday season promotion coming up?

You need to lay the groundwork well ahead of time.

Randomly posting something with the hope that people will flock to your store is not a smart strategy.

Writing a blog post regularly, creating eye-catching images and sharing them on social media is a good start and help drive traffic and achieve other goals.

Solution

Your social media posts should be an extension of your business goals and each post should have a specific goal, be it newsletter sign-up, seasonal promotion or promoting your message as a brand.

Identify your short-term and long-term goals and you need to create blog content based on them.

Then take that content out on social media platforms and promote heck out of it.

Automation tools like Hootsuite and Buffer allow you to schedule your posts easily and curate your content ahead of time.

5. Not Using CTA (Call to Action) Enough

CTA (Call to Action) is a marketing technique where you try to encourage readers to take action with clickable texts or graphic.

No matter how many Likes or Retweets your post gets, if you are not driving traffic to your site or getting any lead or conversion, your presence on social media is pointless.

As Social Media becomes a noisier place, your copy and images you use play a huge role in turning people casually skimming busy feeds into curious web visitors.

Solution

You don’t have to be a great copywriter to be able to write a compelling headline on your social media post.

Use simple words to encourage visitors to visit your site, subscribe to a newsletter or get freebies.

When writing copy, always don’t forget to put yourself in readers’ shoes and think about how your copy would make viewers feel.

Some of the most persuasive words are:

  1. Free
  2. Instantly
  3. Easy
  4. Amazing
  5. Sensational

It’s obvious these words sound positive and have an emotional impact on people. Getting customer’s attention is important.

6. You Are Only Promoting Yourself and Not Helping Others

It’s so easy to fall into this trap as, after all, you are there to promote your business.

But unfortunately, people are not there to listen to your sales talk or watch a commercial. People are averse to banner ads these days.

If all you do is promoting products or talking about yourself, they will turn away and unfollow you.

Another example of self-promotion is Twitter’s DM (direct messages).

On Twitter I am sure this has happened to you before. Someone starts to follow you and once you happily follow back, you will get a thank you message.

Then, either in the same message or another message that arrives shortly, a user starts to talk about themselves and start promoting their service before even finding out anything about you.

I have received a few of those and I am not even interested in their service even though they may be in a similar niche.

Solution

Whether you call it Rules of Thirds or 80/20 Rule, you don’t want to be too promotional on social media.

As a business owner, finding new customers is one of the most difficult things. But before selling anything, first, you need to let people out there know you have something interesting to offer.

You need to get them on your radar first and attract them to your brand.

How do you do that?

First, you need to do it without monetary return. Some of the popular ways to do this in the online world is publish useful information on your blog – text or video – that teaches something relevant to your audience’s interest.

You need to prove to people first that you provide something valuable. Only then maybe in the future they might consider spending their hard-earned cash on your offering.

Conclusion

While innocent social media blunders on your personal account may become only a fun topic for dinner conversations with friends, the same mistakes on a business level could even cost your reputation.

If you are new to social media marketing, I hope the list of these social media marketing mistakes has shed some light on you.

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