While maintaining a presence on social media is vital to modern businesses, jumping onto a platform without a plan can hurt more than help. Not all content is created equal—some actions are harmful to your accounts before they get off the ground. Knowing the most common social media mistakes to avoid is as crucial to developing a successful strategy as knowing what’s trending and healthy for your account. Here are a few mistakes that can hurt your brand growth that you should stop immediately.
Inconsistent Posting
Sporadic and irregular posting can affect the visibility of your account and how often platforms push your content. Following an inconsistent posting schedule lowers your relevance on social media, defeating the whole purpose of putting your business out there, to begin with.
Inconsistency includes both posting too frequently and needing to post more regularly. Posting too much can be flagged as ‘spam,’ while posting too little can cause you to get lost in the feed. Both will affect your visibility and simultaneously lead to a decrease in engagement if you’re audience can’t find your posts to interact with.
Creating a content strategy can help prevent inconsistent posting by implementing tools such as automotive content scheduling. True Anthem’s AI allows businesses to create a posting schedule that determines how much content they should post and optimizes these posts based on when their audience will most likely engage with it.
Neglecting Platform Specifics
Treating all platforms the same is a recipe for disaster. While the intention of all social media channels may be similar–to engage as many users as possible for as long as possible–each has a unique strategy, algorithm, and method.
For example, different platforms cater to certain types of demographics. LinkedIn is seen as more of a professional business platform, while Instagram wavers towards visually aesthetic images and short-form videos. Yes, you can post various videos, photos, and graphics across most accounts. However, it’s important to determine where your audience is most engaged to determine which accounts you should be putting most of your efforts into.
Ignoring Data
Social media analytics can be overwhelming, but there are other answers than ignoring them. There’s a benefit to this data when crafting a social media strategy.
Analytics helps you see who is consuming your content, when, where, and other details about your audience, such as their additional interests, online behaviors, etc. This information can ebb and flow as your account grows, requiring consistent monitoring to adjust your social media strategy accordingly.
Still feeling overwhelmed? Truth Anthem has tools to help with this. Our algorithms leverage real-time analytics from your channels to optimize your content distribution based on what the analytics prove is working and predictions for what could work. In short, we take all of the data and apply it for you.
Poorly Crafted Content
Social media is not a place to put quantity over quality. You can quickly tank your progress on a platform by wasting your effort on low-quality content—the one fact proven true across all platforms!
If you do nothing else on social media, ensure you create and distribute high-quality and relevant content. Your posts should be engaging, on target with your audience, and include quality videos and eye-catching photos. Creating compelling content matters, and we have more tips if you need to help put together posts for your brand.
Neglecting Real-time Engagement
When businesses implement automated social media posting, it can remove a lot of pressure. But don’t let this step prevent you from interacting with your audience. Engaging with your followers when they are active on a platform is important to your brand growth. It shows users you care.
Ignoring comments and messages for days can not only put a sour note on how your audience starts to see your brand, but platforms will hold it against you. Like all else, social media platforms track your interactions with users and will often penalize accounts with slow reaction times.
Ready to Start Planning?
Now that you know what NOT to do on social media, creating a social media plan that works for your brand seems easier to tackle. With True Anthem’s tools for automating and optimizing, brands can start on their platforms strong without wasting time on trial and error.
