On average, Americans are on social media for 144 minutes each day.
Because we are all spending so much of our free time connecting via social media, it’s a great channel for businesses to use to meet their existing (and potential) customers where they already are.
If you’re starting to think about launching a new social media campaign for your company or looking for ways for your organization to get more from your current social media marketing, keep reading for tips on how to avoid making social media mistakes.
What not to do when managing company social media
1. Get too personal
While it’s nice to give your followers an occasional glimpse of your company’s workplace culture, they don’t want to see your #yummylunch at noon every day unless you’re Ina Garten (and even her fans probably don’t want to every one of her mid-day meals.
Be thoughtful when planning how and when to add personal content to your business social accounts so that it doesn’t work against you and cause your audience to disconnect.
When it comes to hiring, it can help to show-off examples of workplace culture. If you are a large organization where frequent posts might make sense, create a separate “careers”-focused account for sharing info about company events, photos from behind the scenes, praise for employee successes, and more.
Inspiration
While FabFitFun maintains an Instagram account for promoting their products, they post to a separate account created just to showcase employee news and other social happenings from their company.
2. Use an inconsistent voice
Is your brand funny? Serious? Friendly? Direct? Whether you’re ready to share a helpful search engine optimization tip or post a trending meme, keep your messages clear and consistent across all your channels (web, social, and face to face). Staying true to your brand is important for your followers to know exactly why they follow you.
3. Promote the same content too often
With so many voices on social media, it’s easy for your posts to get lost in the noise. That’s why, generally speaking, it’s not a bad idea to go ahead and queue up a post that performed particularly well last week to try and introduce it to any followers who may have missed it the first time around. Recycling and reusing content is great to get well-performing posts back out to your audience again.
But, be careful! You may run into trouble if that same post is all your followers are beginning to see from your company. No one wants to see the same content over and over again—especially if it’s self-promotional content.
To avoid follower burnout, here are some ways you can keep your feed engaging:
occasionally introduce new social templates that match your brand
create a series of posts on a theme
share the love by telling client successes
offer exclusive downloadable offers
Inspiration
Most days, TBH Creative uses social media to update our followers on our current projects, share our newest resources and blog articles, and showcase our clients, but we also sprinkle in posts that provide free resources and marketing tips.
4. Lose focus of your goals (and audience needs)
With so many providers in the game, people don’t necessarily buy what you do, they buy because of how you do it. Adjust your content appropriately to what may reach your audience best.
Consider the following questions when evaluating your audience and goals:
What is your goal for the post?
Why are you posting it?
Who do you want to see it?
What action are you looking for as a result of your post?
If you have made one of the mistakes above, have no fear. Use what you learned from those social media mistakes to refine your strategy. Need a little help getting a greater ROI on your marketing outreach? Talk to an experienced digital marketing agency, like TBH Creative. Since it’s their expertise, they will often give you things to think about that weren’t even on your radar so you can better integrate your social media messaging with all of your other marketing initiatives.
