Thinking: ‘me, me, me’

Social media is a fantastic opportunity to showcase your brand’s personality, highlight your expertise and share your content and insight. However, no one likes the person at the party who just wants to talk about himself. And you should make sure your brand is not that person on social media.

If you only ever schedule tweets sharing links to your own download pages or blogs (no matter how good they might be), you aren’t going to see the returns you need. Similarly, a refusal to engage with wider industry discussions and ignoring people when they try and force an agenda on you will come across equally narcissistically.

If your content is being produced with your customers’ and prospects’ challenges and focuses front of mind, social media should present plenty of natural opportunities for you to steer conversations towards the solutions you have. This is particularly true on both LinkedIn and Twitter where business people regularly reach out to the crowd to solve the problems they are facing. Engagement, rather than bombardment, is key.

Forgetting images

Once upon a time social media streams looked very different. They resembled never-ending lists of text-based updates, and people were only too happy to read through them all and click on the links specified. But in time, even Twitter – the platform that was built on the model of ‘microblogging’ – has started to include more visual content. We are now living in the era of imagery; photos and videos rule the waves.

And smart marketers are well advised to remember this development when creating their organisation’s social strategies and calendars. Everyone has heard about eight-second attention spans, online noise and content overload, and all these things have contributed to the rise of imagery on social media. In order to grab the audience’s attention and attempt to stand out from the crowd, it’s important that marketers include, where possible, imagery to accompany their social updates.

Relying on the wrong metrics

Social media – when used in an unsophisticated manner – is correctly maligned for promoting vanity metrics. Very few companies and even fewer c-suite executives are going to place too much stock in measures such as retweets and followers. And no marketer should look to share such figures as proof that their social media plan is working. Yes, these things are indicative of success, but they do not necessarily have any relation to business growth and contribution to the bottom line.

Marketers have to be aware of the level of engagement their prospects are having with their content (which can include things like retweets, click and downloads), and there are appropriate forums in which to disclose and discuss such things, but it certainly isn’t as part of a play to show marketing contribution to wider business. Whenever attempting to do this, leads, conversions and cash always speak the loudest.

Thinking social is free

While logging in to Twitter, LinkedIn or any of the other social networks doesn’t have the same budgetary considerations as designing, printing, mailing and following up an elaborate direct mail campaign might, only a fool would regard social media success as being available to anyone and everyone free of charge.

Social media is not free. There’s the time (years) it takes to build a decent online following. And once you’ve secured a following, there’s the cost associated with ensuring you’re delivering the content as and when they want it; it’s very easy for someone to click ‘unfollow’, after all. Ultimately, social media is a channel like any other; it requires commitment, content, strategy and application, and none of this is free. There are also the increasingly worthwhile forms of paid social media postings available too. Social can be a costly, but essential commitment.

Automating it all

While the advances being made in robotics and humanoid technologies are progressing apace, with some creations now able to convince real humans online of their own sentience, it’s unlikely that any of these prototype machines are sitting in your office. And for this reason it’s vital that marketers don’t become over-reliant on the automation and scheduling technologies that exist.

Scheduling and automation tools certainly have an important role to play, especially if you are trying to reach audiences that may not be operating in the same time zone as your office, but it’s not hard to spot the organisations that automate everything. The spontaneity is often missing, and without the realtime box being ticked social media loses some of its charm. Marketers are well advised to use scheduling and automation where appropriate but it would be a huge error to eschew the human touch. You should have someone within the marketing department aware of what is happening on social media in real time wherever possible.

Ignoring criticism

Social media is awash with people complaining. And it’s not hard to see why. In the old days if a customer was annoyed, they’d have told a few of their friends and then addressed the company in question privately over the phone or via email. It was very easy for a disreputable company to hide dissatisfaction among its customer base. But all that changed when social came along. All of a sudden disgruntled customers across the globe had a very public platform in which to air their complaints, and companies were no longer fully in control of their public personas.

It’s very likely that one of your customers or prospects will take issue with your organisation publically at some point, and it’s vitally important that you face criticism and respond to it accordingly. There is nowhere to hide if people do complain via social media. You need to ensure you are geared up to respond in a way that rescues the situation. It’s often the case that a complaint can be turned into a positive if the company is able to remedy the situation in a timely fashion. Bad PR can very quickly turn into good PR if handled correctly. The last thing you want to do is ignore complaints. It looks like you don’t care.

Focusing on the wrong network

The golden rule of marketing in the content-focused digital era is: be where your customers are. When it comes to social media you need to be contributing to the social spaces in which they are electing to interact. And while research is key here, it’s fairly unlikely you’ll find that all your different buyer types are neatly huddled together in one little corner of the internet. You’re probably going to need to cast your net a little further afield.

This is where having a presence on more than one social network can come in handy. It’ll require more effort, but the rewards should be obvious. In B2B many brands have active presences on both Twitter and LinkedIn. Some also leverage Facebook and even Instagram and Pinterest too. If your customers want it, then you have to be there.

One word of warning: users interact with content in different ways depending on which platform they are on. It pays to research what works where. Learn from your own mistakes and recycle content accordingly.

Leaving it to the intern

Everyone working in marketing is under pressure to deliver these days. Relatively few people are sitting around twiddling their thumbs and waiting for the clock to say 5:30. And for this reason the department’s more perfunctory tasks are often offloaded on the most junior members of the team. With social media you could even justify handing it over to younger members of the team with the ‘millenials get digital’ excuse. But this would be a mistake.

Social media is about so much more than simply writing posts, uploading images and counting follower numbers. It is a window into your brand, its practices and the people making it happen. And for this reason the channel must be treated with the appropriate level of importance. You shouldn’t ask anyone who lacks a full understanding of your corporate tone of voice and content and social media strategies to run social media for you. By all means allow them to learn under supervision, but blindly handing over the reigns is both unfair and unwise.

Not thinking globally

Social media is global. That means, regardless of who you have traditionally sold to, your organisation is global too. People from around the world are able to follow you, interact with your content and form opinions about your organisation as a result. You never know, they might even go on to decide that they’d like to do business with you.

For this reason, it’s worthwhile acknowledging their existence. This is fairly easily done, even from half the world away, by scheduling a few automated posts. Even if they are just posts previously sent out to your native followers, it’s best to offer something for foreign audiences. You’ll easily be able to ascertain which countries are interested by cursory examinations of your analytics platforms.

Overplanning

There is no doubt that solid business, marketing and content strategies underpin social media success. Without recourse to documented rationales regarding what you are trying to achieve and why, social media can be a complete waste of time. Such documents should be well thought out and distributed as widely as necessary so everyone knows what’s expected. But to imagine that the plans and protocols detailed in these strategies are all you’ll ever need to guarantee success is a mistake.

Social media is unpredictable by its very nature. Unexpected news events, new trends within your sphere of influence, issues raised by your customers and initiatives undertaken by your competitors and peers can all serve to create unforeseen opportunities and issues that need addressing. It’s vital that your approach to social media allows for a little flexibility. By ignoring unforeseen developments you may be losing valuable engagement opportunities and that is a serious social faux pas.

So, there you have it. The top 10 social media errors and 10 easy-to-implement methods of ensuring you and your team don’t fall victim. Some may be easier said than done, and you might already be on top of some of the others, but you get nothing in this game for burying your head in the sand. If you’re falling short in any of these areas, it’s best you address them as quickly as possible. Your competitors will be only too happy to entertain your prospects for you.