12 Social Media Marketing Mistakes To Avoid in 2020

With the advent of Facebook in the year 2004, people have got used to sharing their life on social media. Twitter or Instagram scroll or Snapchat streak has become the morning ritual for almost 90% of youngsters.

Social Media has an untapped potential in Brand visibility and creating Brand awareness with a magnanimous target audience in all the niche.

Brands like McDonald’s, Burger King, Coca-Cola, Adidas are already loved by their audience due to their engagement on Social Media.

However, still, certain brands are failing to meet the expectations of their audience.

Don’t worry, it’s not too late yet, to revamp your social media strategy for 2020. All you have to do is avoid these mistakes;

1. Not listening to your audience

Customers are the most crucial part of the product life cycle, right from the time you start planning to the time they provide feedback.

Not actively listening to your audience can cause great loss, not just money, but it can result in negative publicity of your brand.

Here are a few things you can do to pay attention to your customers:

• Actively listen to your audience across all the touchpoints through their interactions.
• Take surveys and feedback before designing a new product or updating your existing services.
• Keep the customers in the loop by engaging with them on social media and support forums.

Once your audience feels that their insights are important to you and that their voice is heard, you win half of the game by winning their trust.

You can grab 30% discount using Social Snap Coupon Code.

2. Not having a clear goal

You have a robust workflow for your marketing process. However, these efforts will not be effective if you do not have a clear goal before initiating your social media marketing strategies.

Ask yourself these questions;

• Who is your target audience?
• Which platform is used by them the most?
• What are the expectations of your audience?
• Will your strategies add any value to the customer experience?
• How often should you promote your posts across social media?

Once you have a clear objective, you can prepare the metrics to measure your objectives against the expected results.

This will not only help you in deciding the time frame for your campaigns but, will optimize your budget and the time you spend to market your brand.

3. Lack of a solid strategy

Everyone knows that social media is the key to get the attention of the audience. Yet, most of the time, companies lack a proper plan. You cannot just start posting about your products on social media.

You will need a strategy to pull off social media efforts.

Without a strategy, your marketing efforts will be just an arrow going askew.

Here’s how you can plan an effective strategy that will bring you the result:

• Assemble your marketing team and get down for a solid strategy to plan your social media content. Want help in planning your social media strategy?
• Analyze your target audience and how they are interacting on the internet.
• Prepare a holistic strategy including different formats of content and analyze what’s working with your audience.
• You can also invest in social media marketing tools to streamline your strategies.

Here are a few tools you can use to improve your social media marketing through a streamlined workflow;

• Buffer
• MeetEdgar
• Mention
• Brandwatch
• Social Insider

4. Not tracking the Results

The market is rich with analytical tools that can help you track down the performance of your marketing campaigns and social media strategies.

Failing to leverage these tools to see if your marketing efforts are paying off or not is as good as not marketing at all.

Benefits of tracking results

• It helps you in checking the type of content that your audience prefers to engage in.
• Feedback can help you with planning your next campaign.
• You can gauge the amount that you must spend in paid promotion after checking the post reach.

Here are a few tools to analyze your customer behavior;

• Google Analytics
• SimilarWeb
• Google Trends
• SocialRank

Don’t forget to add UTM parameters to your links as that will save you from the Google Analytics new sessions discrepancies you might experience when not using parameters.

5.Not optimizing the content for each platform

There are a ton of social media platforms that have emerged as a potential channel to reach out to the target audience.

However, simultaneously, not all of your users are present across all the platforms.

Different platforms have different sharing formats;

• Facebook allows the sharing of multiple photos, videos, blogs, and stories.
• Instagram allows only ten photos to be posted simultaneously and videos under one minute.
• IGTV has changed the way videos are consumed through its vertical video format.

It is advisable to optimize the content across each social media platform to get good results. Providing an omnichannel experience can work wonders, but, this can backfire if you fail to produce content specific to each channel.

6. Poorly handling the negative comments

Not everyone who uses your products and services would spread good reviews of your brand. You must be open to negative comments about your brand as much as you like the praise.

Most of the time, companies fail to handle the negative publicity. This not only harms their brand identity but can also result in losing customers.

An angry customer is equivalent to a failed product when it comes to the brand’s success.

Below are a few tips to maintain a healthy customer relationship;

• Your community management team must be active in responding to user queries and comments.
• Rather than protecting or defending your brand in negative comments, empathize with the emotions of your user.
• Try to resolve their problems as quickly as possible.
• Compensate for a bad experience with complimentary gifts or free vouchers.

7. Not interacting with your audience

How many times have you seen people taking interest in the Twitter wars among world-class brands?

Social Media keeps the mass well-informed about everything that happens around the world.

Engaging with your audience is imperative for not only brand awareness and visibility, but also to convert that audience as your brand promoters.

Below are a few methods to engage with your audience:

• Reply to the comments of your followers and the messages received on your official accounts.
• Repost the story tags on Facebook and Instagram.
• Respond to posts where you have been mentioned.

This is beneficial in the long run in fostering healthy customer relations.

8. Purchasing fake followers

ALERT! Numbers are important when it comes to showcasing your brand on social media. However, never resort to fake followers.

There are a lot of apps and websites that generate bot followers. However, your audience is smart. Moreover, a brand image once blemished is difficult to turn the other way.

Stay away from purchasing fake followers!

There are several other ways to get followers;

• Add value to your customer’s experience with your products.
• Use tools to analyze your audience’s behavior and cater to them with relevant content.
• Use hashtags on platforms like Twitter and Instagram to increase your reach.
• Couple organic reaches with paid promotions to ensure that your posts reach a wider audience that can be potential leads.
• Engage actively with your followers across all channels.

9. Not being active

Once you are on social media, you cannot be active there. It would be foolery to first invest time, efforts, and money in building social media profiles and presence and then staying away from creating content.

With cutthroat competition, you will soon be forgotten if you are not active. Moreover, of course, you would not want to be lost in the oblivion.

Even if you are a small scale business and do not have sufficient content to stay put on social media, ensure to post at least three times a week.

One of the best things you can do to stay active is by posting user-generated content. Ask your audience to tag your brand, and all you have to do is repost.

Do not forget that social media stories are one of the best ways to get yourself out there and, it will not take much time to design wooing stories.

You can use tools like Canva and Unfold, they have plenty of ready-to-use social media templates.

10. Measuring the wrong KPIs

You might be a brand that is on the right track with a strong social media strategy and the right tools to check user engagement.

But, are you checking the right Digital Marketing KPIs that will decide your growth? If not, it’s about time to gear up for a strategic check on KPIs.

This is how you can prepare KPI;

• With analytical tools, gauge your audience’s preference and the channels through which they are engaging the most.
• Prepare metrics that align your goals with the results you are expecting. This can be the number of followers over a period, the number of conversions through social media or it can even be customer reviews.
• Keep a close check on your KPIs to prepare and execute a marketing strategy.

11. Too much brand promotion

Brands who are loved by all are doing something right.

What is that you may ask? They are simply adding value to the user’s feed with content that is helpful to better their life.

The ultimate goal of brands should be addressing the pain points of users. Brand identity and sales are a by-product in that case.

So, rather than filling your social media account with too much promotional content, create experiences that are helpful for your target audience. Promote your brand but with subtlety.

Start by sharing how your products and services have been helpful to your clients.

12. Not utilizing influencer marketing

2020 is here and it is time you realize the potential of Influencer Marketing. The majority of brands are leveraging this potential.

Prepare your 2020 social media marketing strategy to include Influencer Marketing.

Numerous tools will help you connect with the Influencers in your niche.

To name a few:

• Hypeauditor  
• Awario
• BuzzSumo
• Traackr
• Upfluence

You can also track their engagement with their followers to see if the money that you will be investing in is worth it or not.

Wrapping it up:

Your customers are smarter and by no means, they can be deceived in the name of sales and discounts. Brands have to provide value and unparalleled user experience to get an edge over competitors.

I hope the above-mentioned points would have highlighted the mistakes that you must avoid in 2020 to craft a seamless social media experience for your audience.