5 MAJOR SOCIAL MEDIA MISTAKES YOU MIGHT BE MAKING

5 Major Social Media Mistakes You Might Be Making

Social media is an endlessly valuable tool that every business should incorporate into their marketing routine.

It’s a quick way to get smaller tidbits of information out to your audience rather than sending an email newsletter, and can work to get new customers familiar with your business as well. With the number of platforms available today, it can feel overwhelming. But if you aren’t well versed in social media, fear not, there are a few quick tips to help you maximize your potential.

1) Reduce interactions with your audience by posting too much or at bad times

The easiest way to turn your audience off? Overload them with content. The easiest way to get little to no interaction on your posts? Schedule them at bad times. It’s a concept that sounds overwhelming, but is really simple at the end of the day. For example, if your primary audience is educators, you would want to steer clear of posting during the average school day if you want to get optimal interaction with your posts. This article from Buffer goes in depth into a case study on just how much posting frequency affects the reach that you can get on Facebook in particular.

2) Not utilizing the right platforms for the right purposes

Quick example – if your primary audience is millennial women in their 20s, your best bet would be to use Twitter or Instagram; platforms such as Facebook, while they may still be effective, will likely not have the reach that the aforementioned platforms would have. Videos are great ways to share information in a quick, creative way, but aren’t always best suited for LinkedIn – Twitter, Instagram and, increasingly, Facebook, are great ways to seamlessly share videos with your audience. Want to share a quick two-sentence piece of information? Twitter is your go-to. Often, social media is over-estimated. If you’re social media savvy yourself, it’s often as simple as thinking about what you like and don’t like to see on specific platforms. You’re likely not alone with your preferences.

3) More specifically, not utilizing LinkedIn for the right purposes

Using LinkedIn to engage with your audience for specific business purposes is the best way to utilize the platform. You can directly get feedback from the most important players in your business – your highly engaged, business-minded customers. LinkedIn is best utilized for strictly business purposes – new developments at your business, upcoming programs or events and job openings are all perfect content for this platform. If you want to share something more lighthearted, while it can still find some success on LinkedIn, it may be a better fit for Facebook or Twitter.

4) Not following the rule of thirds/4-1-1 schedule/your version of this

Most agree that you should have a set consistency for the types of post that go out on your social media. Whether it’s ⅓ original content, ⅓ curated content and ⅓ call-to-action or ratios of 4 pieces of curated content:1 retweet:1 self-serving update, there should be a method to your madness on social media. Regardless of the system that you choose, you should have a consistent mix of original content (calls to action, in-house blogs, etc.) and curated content (retweets from similar businesses, sharing articles).

5) Focusing too closely on vanity metrics

The amount of likes a picture gets on Instagram or the shares that a post gets on Facebook can be inspiring (or soul-crushing, depending on which way your metrics go), but you shouldn’t place too much focus on these on their own. While metrics such as likes and new followers can give you an insight into what you are doing right, they aren’t an indicator into how your business is doing. The conversion of social media interactions to customers of your business is the metric that truly matters.