9 blunders social media marketers make

1. Setting wrong set of metrices to measure performance- Although you are doing a lot of hard work, but you never seem to achieve your target? Your ROI is not turning up the way it should have?
Recheck on your metrics that you are looking in to calculate your success rate. Chances are you need to re-consider them and align as per your approach. You cannot expect your website traffic to increase a tenfold if you are focusing more on increasing your Facebook page engagement.
2. Setting unrealistic goals and expectations- Having goals are great; but it’s more important to have goals which are achievable. You cannot expect to genetically modify a crop by launching a missile on space. What I mean is, one should always be realistic while setting up expectations.
Coming up with a campaign for your Pinterest page? Think of what you want to gain out of the whole activity. Hoping of gaining 100 followers overnight in one day of campaign for your 5- month old company may not be a feasible goal you see.
3. Talking about you all the time- Occasional self-promotions are okay but not always. Meaningful connections take time and you are required to associate and connect with fans on an emotional level, developing goodwill for your brand in people’s minds.
4. Not having a clear plan and strategy- A good approach on social media can only be achieved when you clearly know and understand what you want to get out of it, without planning and strategizing your brand will be like fish out of water.
5. Social media strategy not aligned to business- Every business runs on certain targets and mission. Your social media brand voice should reflect the same. If you are a fashion brand, you can’t talk like a news channel. And even more important your offline activities and advertising strategies need to be aligned with social media marketing too!
6. Not monitoring properly leading to delayed responses- Being present on social media means catering to a much larger audience; which means more people talking about you. The more people talk about you, the more you need to listen to them. And given the human limits, it is next to impossible to track all conversations that are being broadcasted about you all the time.
You may set google alerts with a certain keyword, but what about the tons of gossips that’s happening out of google? This is exactly the reason why you need a suitable social media monitoring tool that takes care of your requirements.
It is observed that more often than not, it’s the response time that matters more than the response itself. You may not have an answer to every query of your customer, but a simple statement such as ‘Thank you for your message, we will look into it’ is a big save. A good social media monitoring will ensure your attention in time which means you response time is being checked and save you a crisis.
7. Being inconsistent- There’s a popular saying, ‘What we do every day matters more than what we do once in a while’. Consistency is the key. Get your fans into the habit of talking to you; don’t let them miss you so much that they wipe you off their follow list.
8. Expecting instant results- Social media is quite a different world. At times, a silly video goes viral while a really good content does not get enough attention. Who is to be blamed here?
Not really sure. But one thing that’s logical is expecting magical overnight results from a single post are not quite the right thing.
Just as in our real life we take time to build a good relationship, social media goes the same way. Building a quality community on social media requires dedication and patience. After all you don’t want to be the incentive giver who hosts a brilliant hashtag contest a night and then gets totally forgotten after it’s over.
9. Using the same strategy for all channels- Just as every human is with different set of characteristics, so are the different social channels. Each one of them is meant for serving a different purpose, even though the demarcation may be a little blurry. It’s best to run a test before defining a strategy for each one.