A social media marketing veteran has highlighted four common errors that businesses (fledgeling firms especially) make with their social media content – and four strategies for avoiding them.
Conversion optimisation expert Thomas Griffin emphasises that reaching customers on social media requires a different approach from email marketing or how you create content on your website. A good social media strategy is indispensable today because social media is where your customers are spending most of their time.
However, there are common missteps that are easily made – and, thankfully, some straightforward ways of avoiding them.
Here are four:
- Posting regularly. The misstep here is frantically getting content onto social media on the spur of the moment every day to keep your presence visible. However, if it’s rushed and poor-quality content, it’s going to backfire. Setting up a proactive content calendar can spare you a tumble into this pitfall: you can plot your content out ahead of time, ensuring that you won’t miss a day or overlook valuable seasonal events that can boost interest (and potential conversions). Posting more than once a day is also crucial: A Twitter audience, for example, won’t all be living in the same time zone, so they’ll be looking at their feeds at different times of the day. Do an experiment: post at different times of the day and find out which of these generates the greatest engagement.
- Optics. If your content looks strikingly different from one post to the next, your identity and recognisability dissipates. Keep your content recognisably part of your brand in its colour mixtures, fonts, images, videos, tone and, if you use them, in personas. Your brand becomes identifiable and memorable as a result.
- Getting the same content on all platforms. You don’t need completely different content for each social media platform. However, content that’s framed for Instagram won’t sit comfortably on, say, LinkedIn, without some modification. Tweak it, but don’t exhaust yourself with entirely different content.
- Flying blind vs doing research. Explore the different platforms and determine which one is most suited to your business. There are perfectly good social media platforms out there that you might nonetheless be wasting your time and effort on simply because they’re not suitable for your business sector and won’t give you the engagement and conversions you’re seeking.
However, you also need to research your audience – critically, you need to know what their demographics are and what their interests are or you’re shooting in the dark. Conducting occasional surveys and using the analytics on social media platforms will grant you invaluable information on both. By understanding your target audience, and following the four tips above, you’re well on your way to ensuring that your social media campaigns are successful.
