Social Media Marketing Mistakes We Made So That You Don’t Have To

When it comes to social media marketing, it takes time, trial and error to nail down your strategy. Since being founded in 2012, we’ve made these social media mistakes so that you don’t have to:

Winging Your Social Strategy

Kickstarting your organisation’s social media is an exciting process, it’s no wonder you want to get started as soon as possible!

We rushed into creating our social accounts, covering as many platforms as we could think of, and randomly following accounts that we came across in the hope to get a follow-back – we struggled to grow.

Before setting up your social platforms, it is imperative to take the time to understand your goals. A first step in your marketing strategy should be to identify your target audience. Once you have done this, align your social strategy to which platforms they are using.

Conduct market research, speak with your audience and find out which social accounts they use most. As a general rule of thumb Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are the ‘big 4’ social media platforms, and should be primarily focused on. For example, if your audience tells you they love Facebook, focus on organically growing an engaged community here first.

Focusing On Quantity Not Quality

Once you have put into action your winning social media strategy and have connected with your audience, you need to shift your focus to keeping your followers and connections engaged with your brand.

A common mistake for organisations reaching this point is to annoy their audience with too much content – in other words always aim for quality over quantity! Social media should be a place for your audience to relax and unwind, they don’t want to be overwhelmed with brands trying to sell their products!

Be the brand that offers a laugh such as a meme, or subtly communicate to the consumer that your organisation is here in an interesting and educational way – for example “find out why 51% of Ideal Insight followers think TikTok is a dead platform”.

Ensure your content is varied and not too sales-focused, as a rule of thumb, a range between 2 – 5 posts per week is a good place to start. Get to the point, and leave your audience with a strong message to achieve success.

Buying Fake Followers

When researching how to grow your Instagram account, you will be flooded by ads and agencies offering to sell you fake followers.

Fake followers will rarely work unless you are just starting out. There is comfort in conformity, and potential audience members are more likely to be drawn to an account with a medium sized following rather than a small one. However, once you surpass this threshold – which you quickly will if you are following a well-thought out social strategy – buying fake followers will do nothing for your account.

As time goes on, users are becoming increasingly suspicious of fake followers, and although the fake accounts may look real, they will not engage with your account. As a consumer, finding a business account with a lot of followers and a lack of engagement (such as likes and comments) screams fake followers, and trust us – it’s not a good look.

Instagram is in the middle of a crackdown on fake followers, in fact they claim to remove millions of fake accounts every day in an attempt to keep the platform relevant and legit. Avoid the temptation of buying fake followers and grow your followers organically!

Deleting Negative reviews and comments

One of the best ways to maintain an engaged community on your socials is to engage with your audience. When your audience sees that you care enough to respond to their comments, they’ll like your brand more. But what should you do when your audience leaves negative reviews?

Have you ever left a negative review on a company’s page only for them to engage in a lengthy response and then delete the whole thread? Although it can be tempting to delete negative comments, a company boasting 5 stars screams fake reviews and people are very suspicious of this.

Keep your social platforms authentic, show your audience that you have nothing to hide. If a customer leaves a genuine negative review, thank them for their feedback, try to resolve their issue and use it to better your organisation. It is impossible to please everyone – your audience will be much more impressed by a brand addressing bad reviews rather than deleting them.

Using irrelevant and spamming hashtags

Hashtag spamming is a big problem for brands – so how many hashtags is too many hashtags?

We’ve been there, we’ve done that, and from our experience posting 30 hashtags does nothing for a post apart from disengage your audience. Although Instagram actively encourages users to maximise the 30 hashtags allowed per post, we suggest as a general rule of thumb around 10 hashtags on Instagram, and a maximum of 5 on Twitter will best optimise your posting. Ensure that your hashtags are relevant to your brand and consistent across posts.

Want to kickstart your social accounts? We are Ideal Insight, a video-first team of social media experts and content creators. Our journey started in 2012, where we grew our business through video marketing and organic social media. During this journey, we learned a lot and made the mistakes so that you don’t have to.