5 Common Social Media Mistakes Your Business Should Avoid

social media mistakes

If you’re not careful online, common social media mistakes can be costly for your business. Many companies struggle to build a social media presence. Why? These platforms allow businesses to engage and reach out to a large audience.

Common Social Media Mistakes

With good social media marketing strategies, a business can reach beyond its audience to gain more traction and influence. However, while it’s a great frontier every business should take in, many mistakes can still happen.

We will be discussing some of them here, so you are aware and avoid repeating them while posting content.

Read Our Guide: How to Develop a Goal-Driven Social Media Marketing Plan

1. Not Relating to the Trends

While it’s good for a business to be with the times by relating to the current trending topics on social media platforms, you must make sure that you know enough about them. They should be topics that can only show your business in a positive light.

Unfortunately, too many businesses capitalize on trending topics so much that they post something insensitive or downright offensive, which can negatively impact their company’s reputation.

One example you should take as a warning is a tweet that DiGiorno Pizza made back in 2014. A thread about domestic abuse was trending on Twitter, and every person could connect to it by starting their tweet with #WhyIStayed.

However, DiGiorno Pizza tweeted,” #WhyIStayed You had pizza.” As a result, they received a ton of backlash and have made a public apology on the platform. Not following trending hashtags is one of the most common social media mistakes.

2. Overposting

We often hear the saying, “Quality over quantity,” which applies to many things, including how much a business posts on social media. In this case, a business can alienate its followers by posting too much stuff that they become desensitized to everything you have to say and even annoy them to the point of unfollowing you.

If you don’t know how much you should post, you can take a quick look at your engagements and see for yourself. For classic social media platforms like Facebook, three to five weekly posts should be good enough. For Twitter, a tweet a day is already a steady amount of content for your followers.

3. Failure to Respond

Another of the most common social media mistakes is to ignore comments.

The whole point of creating an account on popular social media platforms is to connect with your audience, and if you’re not doing that, then it’s a huge waste of time. And even if you’re often dealing with negative comments and complaints, you should still engage with them promptly and appropriately.

One unfortunate example would be British Airways. A customer complained about the airway’s service, and his complaints went unacknowledged for eight hours. To make matters worse for the company, the customer paid to promote his tweet, resulting in the tweet being seen by a bigger audience.

It’s detrimental to the company as it can damage its reputation. Who wants their company to be branded as uncaring about their customers? So, always try to engage with your customers, even if their feedback is negative.

4. Being Overly Promotional

You can promote your products and services on social media, but that shouldn’t be the only thing you’re feeding your audience. For this one, you can create the 80/20 rule. It means that 80% of your content should be something your audience wants to see, and the other 20% should be for promotions.

Yes, the main goal of your social media accounts is to engage with your audience, but that shouldn’t only consist of selling them your stuff. Engagement also means relating to them, being updated with the latest trends, and interacting with them regularly.

For example, if your business is all about clothes, you should publish posts about the latest celebrity fashion, the hottest accessories on the market, etc. Diversity is key to social media content, and if your content only consists of selling, selling, and selling, then you’re going to fail, fail, and fail.

5. Posting the Same Stuff on Every Social Media Platform

A lot of businesses often post the same stuff on all of their social media platforms. This is another one of the most common social media mistakes.

While that takes less work, it seems like your business is inauthentic and lazy. Each social media platform is unique, and you should take advantage of it. For example, Instagram and Pinterest are photo-driven platforms.

So, for these sites, you should post pictures of your products or related stuff. With Twitter, you can engage with your audience with a short tweet.

For example, you’re trying to promote loans. A good tweet could be, “If you have outstanding debt, DM us and let’s talk about it.” In short, do not be lazy with your posts and try to take advantage of the strengths of each social media platform.

Your Next Steps

Although social media platforms can be used by businesses to connect with their audience, there are also a lot of mistakes that every business should avoid, lest their social presence will be hugely impacted or, worse, the company’s downfall. It’s a very powerful tool only if you use it correctly.

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