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Since social media is such a pervasive part of our online world, it’s hard not to have a social media strategy these days. After all, you have to keep up with your family and friends who are using those sites. You also have an opportunity to promote your brand story, content and products.
As time goes on, you should be staying abreast of any changes so that you can benefit from new features. While there are many benefits to active social media accounts, one also has to understand that there is a learning curve involved too.
And as with anything else in life, there’s no guarantee of success. Social media takes work, effort, commitment, and patience.
But what if you’re not seeing the results that you expect? Social media strategies fail to deliver results for many reasons. That’s why we’re going to discuss the most common social media failures, so you can avoid them.
What is Failure in Social Media Marketing?
A social media strategy is a carefully thought-out plan that helps you meet your business goals and provides a boost to the bottom line. If your social media strategy does not contribute to meeting your business goals, your strategy is failing.
What goals am I referring to here? Your goals can be specific to generating leads using social media, driving traffic to your website or selling your products on social media. This feature is in social commerce platforms like the Facebook marketplace.
Here are the top 5 reasons why your social media strategy is failing:
1. Your Values Don’t Match your Strategy.
As a business, you must have created a list of your brand values, if not, there is no way people will understand what your brand stands for. A company’s values are what it stands for as an organization.
The way you present yourself to others is crucial in the way they will view your products, services, and overall business. Therefore, your values need to be consistent with those of the social media platforms you are using and those of your audience.
Your followers expect to see something that reflects your company’s mission statement or core values every time they see something from your business on social media. When they don’t see anything aligned with these principles, they won’t hesitate to let their friends know.
So, if you open a restaurant that serves only Keto recipes, explain your reasons for opening up that business to your potential customers. Remember, your reason for it cannot be because it’s a trendy business right now. You’re doing this because people aren’t eating healthy, and you want to change that. Try sharing content that explains why a Keto Diet is healthy for your audience and what you have to offer.
2. There is No Consistency.
There is no point in starting a great campaign if you are not going to keep up with it. Running and managing a social media campaign demands consistency in its approach. It’s not just about the quality of the posts you create or the content you dish out to your audience. It’s about how consistent your post and the quality content you create. This means the days and times to post (your social media schedule).
Social media platforms have made an effort to create inbuilt analytics tools to help you gather this information. If you have made the right choice in a social media marketing tool, this information will be available to you.
Research can come in handy, like searching for important people in a social network’s search tool. You could also use a tool like SocialBro or google trends to find out some more information on your audience, like what topics are trending
You can use tools like SEMRush, HootSuite, Buffer, or SproutSocial to manage your social media posting and scheduling. Also, do some research on the best times to post, and also the best performing content.
Additionally you can create an editorial calendar to keep you organized and directed since it contains a deadline, target keywords, the format of the content, call to action, and status. And it has the ability to double your ROI.
3. A Misunderstanding of How Social Media Works.
Sometimes businesses fail to recognize the social media platform(s) that are best suited to them. For example, Facebook is the biggest social media platform owning over 78% of the social media market share. Because it’s the most frequently used it’s the most trustworthy. But, it may not be a fit your business.
When we look back to the Keto restaurant example, that business should focus on a more image-based platform like Instagram or Pinterest. This is because that’s where people who love foot, healthy eating go to share and engage. But, a business consultancy wouldn’t really benefit much from being on Pinterest.
They would better perform on a platform like LinkedIn since the audience is a more business focused demographic. Again, it’s all about researching where your audience spends most of their time.
You could start of by checking out platforms like statistica, or Pew Research. There you will find the demographics of each social network. Another and even greater option is asking your current customers what they prefer. You can run a targeted survey to get this information.
4. Your Content is Not Unique.
Content is all you keep hearing about when it comes to a social media marketing strategy. That’s because it’s a major part of your social media marketing campaign, without it you might as well forget about implementing your strategy. But, if everyone is creating and sharing content, why should people like, share, or comment on your content if it’s all the same.
When you are brainstorming ideas, try to come up with content ideas that are unique. To get the best of them, your ideas should be specific to your audience.
Your content can be tailored to your location for example, an article titled “The best Keto Restaurant in Maun” This article focuses on the people where the restaurant is actually located.
5. Lack of Monitoring and Measuring.
You may have identified your audience and the right network to deliver your message, you still need to keep tabs on how effective your content has been. The only way to know this is by monitoring and measuring the results of your campaign.
This could be as simple as seeing how many likes or retweets each post gets or more complex measures. For example, the number of people who visit your website after seeing one of your posts on Facebook or Twitter.
Most business owners simply don’t have the time or resources to do this themselves. Hiring someone who can dedicate even a few hours per week to manage social media will help increase engagement with followers and improve brand recognition among potential customers.
The best way to discover this information is through the use of social media marketing tools like HootSuite, SEMRush, Twitter Analytics, and Facebook Insights
These tools will not only measure your social media success, but they will also increase your Return on Investment.
Think about it this way: If you do a direct mail campaign, and no one responds, do you do another one? Most likely not. Why? Because you know, it didn’t work. However, if you post something on Facebook, and no one comments or likes it, you might assume it wasn’t received well when in actuality maybe your followers just didn’t see the post.
