Social media is a great place for businesses that want to become big brands. It can even turn people into brands. Becoming a brand can boost reach, increase leads and traffic for a company. And if you don’t use social media the right way, it can also damage your reputation. With this being such an important factor, it is crucial that you use social media wisely.
Here are some social media mistakes brands should avoid
Having too many accounts
Sure enough, businesses understand that social media is key to success for a business. Most businesses are quick to jump on the bandwagon and create profiles on every social network they hear about.
Over time, most businesses realize that they are spreading themselves too thin and aren’t getting the results they hoped for. Another mistake startups make is going on and on about their business and earning little, in the form of customer trust and leads, in the end.
This is a big mistake and one that should be avoided at all costs. For successful branding, you need to identify if your business type or category is suitable for social media at all.
Recent research suggests that companies rely on three main social networks for branding purposes:
Other major social media channels are Instagram (with over 500 million users) and Pinterest (over 100 million active users). For brands who rely extensively on high-quality images and media, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest are ideal. For businesses with professional advice and services on offer, Twitter and LinkedIn are the best.
Not engaging or being active
Engagement with the target market is the sole reason companies create social profiles at all. Social media is the popular ‘vent’ for many users. If a person messages a brand with a query and gets no reply, it doesn’t make the brand look good at all.
Successful brands always reply back and use every opportunity to engage their users. Nowadays, many brands have started using social media as a customer service tool as well. Users post a problem and tag these brands, and brands reply almost instantly to help users out.
Domino’s created a unique campaign by urging users to order a pizza directly via Twitter. The method was simple: send a tweet carrying a pizza with emoji to order pizza with the hashtag #EasyOrder. The tweet-based ordering was revolutionary and earned the brand some media exposure as well. Domino’s “is constantly cooking up new ways to reach consumers digitally,” according to Lindsay Beltzer (manager of marketing communications at Tenet Partners).
You should also think of more ways to engage your target audience and make the social media experience a fun thing for them. More than 50% of Domino’s orders come from digital marketing channels, all thanks to their creative usage of social media.
Over-posting
The worst thing a brand can do today is to post the same thing over and over again. It makes you look like you don’t have anything of value to share with your audience.
It definitely looks like the brand doesn’t have much creativity and can’t keep up with the latest trends. Instead of posting a monotonous stream of unoriginal photos with quotes, try and humanize the social media experience by telling your followers that you understand them.
German supermarket chain Edeka utilized the Christmas period to launch a very touching video on YouTube. It featured a lonely old man whose children had no time to visit him for the holidays.
The video ends on a happy note and sends the message of love and togetherness to the audience. The ad gathered about 331,000 likes, 20 million views and 579,000 shares on YouTube, according to digital marketing consultancy Kurve.
It was the most viewed video on YouTube over Christmas. These are the perks you get as a business by staying relevant to your customers. The success of this campaign shows exactly how brands can leverage important events to tell people they are there for them.
Not analyzing
To gain important insights from your social media efforts, it is necessary to see the results of what you do every day. Every social media platform now comes with an ‘Insights’ section, which is open to both common and business users.
If you are not analyzing which content hit the popularity funnel, you won’t get the results you want. It is not the millions of followers who define you as a brand, it is what you do that makes you stronger every day. You can even track your social media metrics right from your site, if you are a WordPress user, or you can use an omnichannel platform.
Not using hashtags and images
Social media is brimming with hashtags these days, so much that it has become essential to have an important hashtag for everything we do nowadays. Every event needs to have a hashtag, and if it doesn’t, the event seems to be unimportant.
Look at any social medium, and you’ll find this to be a universal truth. If you are a brand that posts irrelevant hashtags like #win #Hello #success, then you need to reformulate a creative hashtag strategy.
Then there are extremely inefficient brand profiles who commit the sin of posting only a link in the status bar and hitting the publish button! It is the worst thing you could do on social media as a business! Never post a direct link on a status bar because it makes your profile look like spam.
Buying fake followers on every medium
The idea of gaining millions of followers in a few days seems very tempting, but trust me when I say it is harmful in the end. This is because firstly, you may get caught and secondly, it won’t get you far in terms of popularity.
What a waste of money and creativity if you end up with a lot of followers who are not interested in engaging with you. Brands who nurture their profiles over time get rewarded with organic views and highly engaged followers.
Bonus tip
Dollar Shave Company was a startup when they decided to launch a video to promote their brand to compete with giants like Gillette. Their wise-guy commercial posted on YouTube earned them not only a lot of customers right after the launch, but also a 2016 Shorty Award for one of the most creative ads in history.
Their idea was very simple; they poked fun at established razor companies who offer pricey razors that last only a month with useless things like handles that light up. Their campaign earned them a 24 percent increase in social media attention and increased social following by 6 per cent. From a startup selling razors, they became an established brand in a remarkably short span of time which only promised good quality razors for a dollar each month.
There is nothing complicated about social media. It is where people spend some leisure time, and by using this medium the right way, you can also introduce your brand to people in a way that they’ll always remember.
Image source
See also: Brand Promotion on YouTube in 5 Easy Steps
