Do you want to expand your business through social media marketing?

Social media is a great platform to do your advertising and for you to establish your brand. With 3.8 billion users recorded in 2020, there’s a high chance your brand will get some attention on different social media platforms. Letting loose while building your profile allows you to quickly establish your brand personality to attract the right people to thrive.

However, there are some social media errors that prevent you from growing as expected. For a small business, these errors can mean the doom of your brand as it sinks deeper into irrelevance after the first mistake.

To prevent this from happening to yours, read what we’ve prepared below. We’ll talk about the errors that can doom your brand and help you master social media marketing today.

Here the ten errors

1. Not Having a Clear Plan From the Start

Like all other marketing tactics, you need to have a clear plan from the get-go. You need to have a good objective and a way to measure your progress towards it. Otherwise, you’ll have no direction on different social media platforms.

While this may not sound too bad, it means you won’t have any means of keeping your followers. Soon enough, they’ll not see any improvement in your brand and will decide to unfollow you. Keeping your followers as you get them is important especially when it will be hard for you to attract them in the first place.

Not having a clear plan also means having no strategy to amass followers on social media. Deciding to wing it will only produce random posts that will lack substance. These won’t catch your audience’s interest and will make you look more like an amateur.

You should also plan the time you’ll allocate towards social media marketing. This will help you consistently upload posts on the platforms you’re in.

Of course, you should also plan how much you’ll invest in it. Social marketing means you’ll need to pay for the creation of ads and to have them displayed. Knowing your budget is a great way to avoid spending too much on social marketing.

2. Failing to Understand Your Target Market

Another mistake made by most small businesses is not understanding their market. Knowing who to market to is essential for success on social media. It’s important in knowing who to reach and how you can reach them.

Start by knowing who your audience will be. Take a look at what your business offers and who may find it interesting. Make that your priority market and know what appeals to them.

Make sure all that you do is relevant to them. All the posts on social media from here on out should be interesting in their eyes. By doing this, you’ll catch their attention, and gain some feedback one way or another.

3. Pushing Your Business Too Much

Hype is important in building excitement around something. It can be a product your promoting or a new service that your business offers. Letting your audience know about it is great, but too much of anything turns it into a bad thing.

Over-promoting yourself is one surefire way to lose followers. You’ll look like a door-to-door salesman trying too hard to sell their wares. It’s a social media platform, don’t forget that people go there to socialize.

Make sure you present yourself as an accommodating brand. Talk about your audience and get to know them once in a while. You won’t appear pushy with your next sales post by doing this.

4. Being Inactive on the Platform

Social media is a large place filled with all kinds of people and businesses. This means that people will have a lot of posts to deal with in their feed. In places like social media platforms, it will mean that people will forget about what’s not on their feed.

This makes it important for you to keep your accounts active no matter what. It’s one of the best ways to stay relevant even without much effort. Set aside some time each day to post something to let people know you’re still around.

If you don’t have enough time to do so, it’s a good idea to invest in automation. There are a lot of tools that will upload posts for you at the time you schedule them to get uploaded. Having an automated social media tool will make sure you never become irrelevant.

5. Being Too Active on the Platform

While activity is important, too much activity can make you look like an annoying presence on any social platform. This applies even when you provide your audience with interesting and informative posts. People will feel overwhelmed, and it will cause them to opt off of following you.

To prevent this from happening, measure your posts and upload them in staggered hours. This way, audiences won’t see too much of your brand to become annoyed.

Make sure that each post is unique, as well. Repetitive posts won’t bring any value to anyone who’s already seen it. They will also appear boring, and your business will be on the receiving end of it.

Don’t upload too many long text posts. Post refreshing photos and videos, instead. These will catch their attention and may even engage them in different ways.

6. Lacking Engagement in Your Posts

Speaking of engagement, not having any will make you a bland brand on social media. People won’t find any reason to engage with any of your posts. This will hinder your growth as engagement is vital to the algorithms in any platform.

Your posts on social media should elicit activity from your audience. It can be either a rection, a comment, or a share. These all count towards the engagement of a post, helping it become more relevant on the platform.

Make your posts engaging by asking questions to your audience. If you’re posting a video, make sure the first few seconds are engaging even without sound. Some platforms automatically play videos while muted when people scroll by them.

When posting images, take advantage of color psychology. You can invoke certain feelings using different colors in your images. These will help you make your posts feel engaging on a different level.

7. Not Responding to Your Audience

Another mistake that is easy to commit is audience neglect. When people comment on your posts, they expect to get an answer in time. It’s your responsibility as a business owner to respond to these comments.

Answer their inquiries honestly to help them through their problems. If the comments are negative and rude, be the bigger profile. Don’t respond in kind, and be gentle and kind with your answer, instead.

This will show that you’re understanding and are mature enough to not engage in hostility. It will only help your brand grow into a respectable one.

8. Failing to Convey a Professional Tone

It’s good to build a relationship with your audience. However, it’s important that you avoid being too close to them. You must remember that you’re a business profile on social media.

Being too close and personal with your audience will make them forget that you’re a business. It can hinder your growth as a successful brand, making you look like a friend more than anything else.

Avoid sharing too much with your audience to prevent this from happening. Keep your views on hot topics to yourself to avoid causing an uproar with your audience.

9. Uploading Tasteless Posts

A lot of brands, even the big ones, often commit this mistake once in a while. They often post something that may seem inoffensive to them, but their audience may not think the same of the post.

They can find it offensive and will react negatively. It’s going to make your profile look bad to new potential customers. They’ll see the negative press that the post has brought, and will promptly leave.

Think about how your posts will look to your audience before posting them. Be aware of current events to keep yourself updated on any potential triggers on the platform.

10. Providing Horrible Customer Service

One of the most important things to pay attention to is your customer service. Provide service that satisfies your customers if you want to keep them around longer. Horrible service will frustrate them and may cause them to bad-mouth your brand.

To provide good customer service, answer their inquiries, and provide meaningful responses. This way, even if you can’t answer their question, you can direct them to a process that may be able to help them.

Avoid These Social Media Errors Today

Building a promising brand from the ground up is hard enough as it is. You don’t need any social media errors to hinder your progress. By knowing what these errors are, you can avoid them and watch your business thrive!

Are you looking for more ways to advertise your business? We have more guides and articles about advertisements that can help you out! Check them out and see what you can learn today!