Seven social media mistakes you should avoid

Social marketing is booming and in the forthcoming years, almost every business will count on it as a channel for customer acquisition and retention. If you are a marketer or simply starting to market for your company, there are many important mistakes and pitfalls to avoid. Here are seven of them:

It’s all about quality and not quantity!
While paying for extra followers might seem like a good idea to boast your social stock, the reality is none of those followers will have brand loyalty or any relationship with your brand. This means you can hardly convert them to paying customers. Buying fans and followers are normally done either via automated bots, which uses thousands of fake accounts, or as part of an exchange system which requires time, money that could be used to gain real followers instead. It is better to invest your resources reaching the right target audience organically.

Write for people not spiders!
Many marketers fall into the maze of creating highly focused SEO articles, which most of the time could compromise the quality of the content. If you write high quality stuff, people will comeback over and over and these are the people you should be focused on to convert into leads. Readers can easily identify unique style of quality blogging versus systemized redundant use of keywords. At the end of the day, your visitors do not care about your SEO they simply want quality content.

Convert or go home!
Marketing means nothing without analytics, and analytics means nothing if you cannot measure your return on investment (ROI). There are many analytics tools that let you view your conversion broken down by channel, but when it gets down to tracking your conversion to a particular marketing event, such as a social media post or an email campaign, you will have to resort to multiple tools and the setup could get complicated and expensive. We have spent a lot of time and effort making conversion be traced back to a particular event by using our integrated marketing tools. This way you can quantify your effort easily and effectively.

Looks too good not to be polished!
Many marketers panic when they get a negative comment on their social channels or review sites and end up removing them when they can. By doing so, not only you loose one angry customer, you actually loose the chance to solve a problem other users might have experienced but never shared with you. One thing to keep in mind is that people love drama, so having a negative feedback sometime is actually a good thing. It is how you react to that matters. Because companies are run by humans, we expect them to make mistakes, but we look forward to superb customer service, which is what you should demonstrate in your replies.

The new age of social spamming!
While posting daily is important to stay in touch with your fans and followers, over-posting could easily position you as a social spammer. You have to know that at the end of the day, people do not live and breath your company like you do and the last thing they need to see when they open their social profile is 10 feeds from you. Posting one to two posts per day, per channel is definitely enough.

xoxo strategy, 3 are enough to conquer!
Hashtags encourage your audience to a broader discussion about a particular topic, product or brand but be careful when using them. Using long, unrelated hashtags could have a negative effect on your profile. The same applies if you use a lot of hashtags within the same post thinking this will get you more exposure. You will find much better results (retweets, favorites) when using more focused, short and related keywords within the same post.

Strategy is a simple form of discipline!
People tend to overthink the word strategy because they see themselves fail to follow it somewhere along the way. Not having a strategy could be very counterproductive on the long term and can stifle your social growth. And because you did not see the results you need or deviated a little from your initial strategy, that is fine. You have to be smart enough to tweak your strategy until it works for you. One easy way to do it is to break down your Big Strategy into Micro-strategies and try to achieve them one by one. You will feel much better when you achieve one small task at a time, which will keep you motivated.

At the end of the day, every marketers will make mistakes. But the difference between a good marketer and a dumb marketer is that a good marketer identifies the problem in his implementation and try to iterate until he finds the magic potion that works perfectly for his purpose.