One of the most critical aspects of growing a business is the marketing strategy. Having an effective marketing strategy in place will help you explore potential growth opportunities, acquire potential customers, and increase sales. While there are countless marketing strategies to help businesses, social media has established itself as a widely used marketing tool.
From Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, social media platforms are among the leading online tools almost everyone has access to. That’s why digital marketing agencies are using SEO strategies on social media activities to boost a website’s online presence through search engines. Although social media doesn’t directly contribute to SEO rankings, the links shared by the audience on social media platforms increase brand exposure.
While there are plenty of online guides about social media marketing, marketers aren’t immune to committing bad habits. This means they easily fall back on certain strategies without knowing it can ruin their overall marketing objective. In this article, we’re going to discuss the most common habits that can make or break your social media marketing strategy.
Obsessing on vanity metrics
Here’s a fact: engagements and followers alone are not enough to grow your brand’s digital presence. Most marketers and brands are making a big mistake by being contented with simply tracking the number of likes and followers. In reality, the success of your social media marketing relies not only on vanity metrics.
While engagement and community growth are important factors, your metrics should also consider the bounce rate, conversions, time spent on the site, website visits, and audience impressions. Layering all these factors on your marketing metrics will provide a more in-depth perspective on how you’ll adjust your social media activities to achieve your goals.
Social media marketing comes with different objectives, which may depend on your company’s end goal. For instance, improving brand awareness involves pushing for as many brand engagements and audience impressions as possible. There are plenty of ways to do this instead of just focusing on engagements and growth.
Depending solely on social media
While this is common knowledge in the marketing industry, most brands have a habit of pouring all their marketing efforts on social media alone. Here’s the truth: social media is not the only marketing tool responsible for the success of your business. There’s your website, email marketing, content creation, search engine rankings, online advertising, and a lot more. If social media is your only tool on your marketing strategy, then you’ll likely lose against other brands.
User behavior and activity are two important factors before a customer makes a purchase decision. This is why marketers should consider how customers interact with different stimuli when making an online purchase. Relying your sales on social media marketing is like depending on a single channel that only focuses on improving brand awareness.
Another bad habit among brands is limiting their activity on social media to promote a major campaign. For example, if the company is releasing content about a new product, you can write a blog post about it, optimize the content for better online visibility, start an email marketing campaign to boost content traffic, or publish organic/paid content to support the effort. All these activities make up an integrated strategy that can go a long way to boost your brand’s online presence instead of relying all your efforts on social media marketing.
Using poor analytics
Many businesses settle for posting updates on their social media pages and hoping it will reflect on their sales. But this approach is certainly useless if you’re not evaluating your strategies. Social media analytics offer a complete and detailed report about your social marketing strategies’ strengths and weaknesses and ways to improve audience reach.
To prevent using weak analytics, it’s important to organize the data to properly understand the given figures. For example, if you have high engagements and poor impressions, this means the audience liked it, despite being less favored by the algorithm. These data patterns will provide an idea of how to optimize your social media marketing strategies and avoid wasting resources, money, and time.
Avoiding these bad social media marketing habits may not be enough to improve your online presence, but they can help you save the brand reputation and establish credibility. It’s easy to get away with these bad habits, but keep in mind that the social media community has become more critical and sophisticated in interacting on social platforms. While there are plenty of ways to improve your social media presence, it’s important to know the other strategies that will produce better results for your business.
