DON’T WORRY, WE ALL GET IT WRONG SOMETIMES!

We often get businesses coming to us with the whole ‘we’ve tried social media and it didn’t work for us’ attitude, but when we’ve investigated why this might be, we always find that these organisations have been using social media completely wrong.

Every business owner knows how important it is to only invest into things which will bring significant benefits to their business, but unfortunately, Social media and online marketing, in general, is often overlooked by organisations as many feels as though they can ‘do it themselves’.

We see businesses all the time posting out random content on their social media accounts, at random times of the day, with no consistency at all, and this is just one example of why social media marketing doesn’t work for these organisations.

Social media marketing isn’t for the faint-hearted. To be successful, it is important to learn the best practices and avoid common pitfalls that cause social media campaigns to fail. This article will review the most common mistakes made in social media marketing so that you can move forward with your business’s social media.

1. You’re Ignoring the Data and Analytics

Marketing is a data-driven business, so to create a successful social media campaign you need to focus on the analytics. Analytics tools have the ability to inform marketers how their audience reacts to content, which helps determine what kind of content should to posted and when.

While all analytics are important, measuring performance is especially important on platforms such as Twitter and Instagram, where the competition is much fiercer.

Instagram’s analytic tools are great as they allow you to measure post engagement, follower reach, profile clicks, website clicks and even helps predict when the best time for you to post is, based on your interactions. However, other social media sites such as Twitter, don’t have the best analytics for you to use free of charge. We use various programs to measure how a client’s social media is performing, and always review this on a monthly basis.

2. You’ve Misunderstood Your Target Audience

Obviously, as an organisation, you know your target market, but when it comes to online marketing organisations often tend to try and please everyone, rather than focus on their target audience.

In order to make wise social media decisions, you need to suss out what platform of social media your target audience prefers. You should also understand the pain points shared by the target customer, and how the target customer prefers to make purchasing decisions.

Once you’ve identified this, it will be easier to select a channel, content strategy, and call to action strategy that will yield strong results. Once developed, you can use a social media analytics tool to monitor performance and make appropriate tweaks based on the data.

3. Your focusing on the wrong platform

It’s pointless having a winning strategy if your target audience can’t see you. One of the first questions we always ask ourselves when a new client comes on board is, where will their target audience be?

Many organisations just think; ‘we’ll start a Facebook page because lots of people use Facebook’

But are your target audience using Facebook?

This is when understanding your target audience comes in. If you have done your research then you’ll be armed with demographic data and research findings which should give you a clear insight as to what platforms you should be using.

4. Posting bog-standard content

In today’s date, there are over 50million businesses using social media as a form of marketing, so posting typical generic stock content isn’t going to get you noticed among everyone else.

You need to understand what your audience wants to see and come up with creative ideas based on this, which your competitors aren’t already doing.

More often than not, businesses overdo the ‘salesy’ side of social media, which leads to a lack of engagement from the target audience because in reality- who wants to follow a page which is constantly trying to sell you something?

Sometimes, this is the part where organisations decided to bring in an agency, because they are either not equipped to come up with the creative ideas, or they just don’t have time too.

In Conclusion……

Social media CAN be effective if done correctly. Focusing on data, target audience and the content you create is essential in order for your campaign to work.

If you need help or advice with social media for your organisation, then feel free to drop us a line at melissa@beaniemedia.com or call us on 07411306247