Social media is one of the most critical tools in digital marketing, regardless of your business’ size. However, it can also be a double-edged sword. On one hand, social media can give your brand an unparalleled boost that will help you generate more leads for your business. But when you make mistakes with social media, particularly in posting content, it can also negatively affect your business.
Even if you are paying for PPC advertising or social media management, it helps to be mindful of the mistakes you must avoid when posting on social media. Examples of such mistakes include:
1. Posting non-valuable content
Posting on social media will only be effective if your content brings value to your audiences. Sure, sometimes memes and smart jokes are okay, but when you consistently post non-valuable or irrelevant content, it can make your audiences see your social media pages as something that’s not worth their while. So instead of posting the rehashed, bygone listicle for the umpteenth time, come up with something more interesting, something that will bring value to your audiences’ timelines.
2. Having too many promotions
One of the main reasons why people unfollow brands on social media is overpromotion. When you do barely anything else other than promoting yourself, your followers will eventually get sick of the ‘look at me!’ messages and decide to cut their relationship with your brand. Why? Because self-promotional content brings little value to followers, and it’s also often uninteresting.
When you find that your business is laying on the self-promotion too thick, practice the 80-20 rule wherein you post 80 percent non-promotional content and 20 percent promotional content.
3. Settling with boring visuals
You only have two seconds to catch your audience’s attention before they scroll up. How can you do that when you have the most boring visuals ever?
Posting uninteresting, unoriginal, and unimaginative visuals means that you are basically wasting your brand’s potential to capture the attention of the audience. As a result, you’re not maximizing your resources and failing to use social media as a marketing tool effectively. Fortunately, creating attractive visuals is not as difficult as before, not when there are easy-to-use tools such as Snappa or Canva to help you create exciting and original graphics with ease.
4. Not posting videos
Similarly, not posting videos also means you are not maximizing your platform to generate leads and convert viewers into paying customers. There are a lot of reasons why you should post videos on your social media, which are:
- Videos boost engagement and increase brand association
- People like watching videos more than reading posts
- Competitors are using videos on their social media pages
- Videos are useful in generating and converting leads
- Viewers like sharing videos with their friends and family
5. Posting the same content on all social media
Social media platforms have subtle differences that entail tailored content for each platform. Hence, if you post the same content on all your social media platforms, you might not maximize your reach and engagement. But does this mean you have to post separately on each platform? Luckily, some tools allow you to customize your posts for each platform so that you can still post them all at once.
6. Sticking to landscape videos and photos
We’ve gotten so used to posting landscape videos and photos, but they are not the norm now. Today, brands are posting square videos and images because they are not cropped on Facebook and Twitter anymore, and two, they take up more space on viewers’ feeds. Occasional landscape videos and photos are okay, but most of your content should be square or even vertical.
7. Posting inconsistently
As with many other things, consistency is vital when it comes to social media. Posting infrequently might have your audiences losing interest. On the other hand, posting too much can have people unfollowing your page. Hence, finding a balance is crucial when running your business’ social media pages. Try creating a content calendar to ensure that your posts are planned, organized, and not made at the last minute, thus increasing the quality of your content.
8. Not varying your content
Don’t post the same topic or the same type of image over and over again. This is not a productive use of your resources. Instead, diversify your content not only to increase your reach but also to keep your current audiences engaged.
For businesses, social media can be challenging to navigate, as it is rapidly evolving every day. Hence, companies must stay on top of current events to keep up with their audiences and avoid these mistakes when posting content on social media.
What other social media mistakes can you think of? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
