Charles Cruze, Consultant

Social media is susceptible to bad ideas, false starts, and poor execution, just like any other kind of marketing. But social media is one of the most responsive marketing channels as you can test, respond to, and improve your social media plan in real-time.

If your social media plan isn’t delivering the results you want, the following can help you figure out what went wrong and what you can do about it.

8 All-Too-Common Social Media Mistakes

1. Mistaking Broadcasting for Traction

The most successful marketing in this century is conversation-driven. It relies on a back-and-forth between a brand and the public. It must be responsive, engaging, and personalized to be effective. Social media marketing is custom-built for that approach, but only if you use it appropriately.

Warning Signs of Broadcasting

• High follower count with disproportionately low engagement
• Frequent unfollows within days or weeks of being followed
• Lots of likes but few shares or comments

How to Fix This

Make sure somebody is in charge of responding on social media, with time scheduled in their workday to do it. This problem happens most often when social media is designed to be done during “free time,” which means it often gets ignored for hours or days at a time.

2. Checking the Wrong Metrics

Social media provides massive data about how every action you take on a given platform performs with your followers and with the general public.

If your social media plan doesn’t include checking to see what happens with each of your posts, that’s a serious problem but an easy one to fix. A more difficult challenge appears when you’re checking and responding to performance metrics but following numbers that aren’t related to converting social media activity into leads and sales.

Warning Signs of Checking the Wrong Metrics

• Social media metrics changing without a subsequent change in sales or contact numbers
• Making metrics-based changes with no change in results
• Making metrics-based changes with unexpected changes in results

How to Fix It

Focus on the metrics that tell you the most and guide you toward high-impact decisions. Although each company’s situation is different, start by looking at engagement metrics, discrete impressions, brand reach, share-of-voice, referrals, and sales conversions.

3. Bad Ads

Social media advertising is incredibly inexpensive compared to a spot-on television, which can lead to a carefree attitude about your ad spend on your favorite platforms.

It’s also reassuring because cost-per-click advertising means paying only when somebody takes that first action on the customer journey, and you can check the effectiveness of each advertisement.

The combination of these two factors can lead to a dangerous complacency with ad quality, ad placement, and ad targeting to the detriment of your social media plan, and company bottom line.

Warning Signs of Bad Ads

• A click rate under 2% on any given campaign
• Running ads with no observable change in sales
• High bounce rates on the page the ad links with

How to Fix It

Run A/B testing on all of your social media advertising, changing only one factor between the two ads. Use iterative versions of this process to fine-tune what your audience responds to best, fastest, and with the highest percentage of conversations.

4. Leaning Too Heavily on Auto-Posting

Auto-posting services like Hootsuite and TweetDeck allow you to schedule your social media posts for the upcoming week, so your posts publish automatically. You can group similar tasks together and then focus on other things until it’s time to reload the queue. Most people will come up with a higher quality content calendar if they do that creative work in large chunks of dedicated time instead of piecemeal throughout the week.

However, as mentioned earlier, social media’s power is in responsiveness and engagement. If you auto post, there’s a chance you won’t follow your feed closely enough to engage meaningfully. Your followers will notice, and your feed will get less action.

Warning Signs of Too Much Auto Posting

• Low follower engagement even though there’s a large number of followers
• No action on posts within the first hour of posting
• Nobody on your team knows what posted today

How to Fix It

There are two solutions to this problem. The first is simply not to auto-post. Make daily posting and engagement on social media the specific, dedicated job of somebody in the office. It solves the problem of fire-and-forget social media marketing.

5. Talking Too Much About Yourself

You’ve seen bad examples of this in action already: companies or people who only post on social media when they’re asking for a follow, a click to a sales page, or a product purchase. They’re like that one insurance salesperson everyone seems to know who can’t come to a party without trying to sell everyone a policy.  

Social media users are wise to this behavior, quick to judge, and slow to forget. A strong social media plan centers around sharing useful, entertaining, and emotionally engaging content that people who might like your brand are likely to also like. Your feeds become a known center for the “good stuff,” and potential clients spend time there because of the quality of your posts. When you (very occasionally) talk about your business and what you sell, they pay attention because you’ve already taught them you can be trusted.

Warning Signs of Talking Too Much About Yourself

• Nobody shares your content
• Competition and colleagues don’t engage with you on social media
• Low engagement on your posts

How to Fix It

Adopt the 10:1 rule. For each thing you say about yourself, post 10 things about other companies, people, and topics. Every single one of these posts should be relevant to your industry and customer base, but none of them should directly shill for you.

6. Ignoring Your Fan Base

The ultimate example of an empowered and engaged fan base is found at heavy metal concerts. People in attendance spend $40 to $60 to buy a T-shirt advertising the band and wear it proudly for years afterward. They become walking billboards for future sales because they have a meaningful relationship with that brand.

Among the followers and active participants in your social media feed, there’s a subset who are ready to be fans of your brand at that level. Some are long-time customers. Others will never buy from you but like something about your brand enough to go out of their way to help you out. A strong social media plan finds them, activates them, and rewards them.

Warning Signs You’ve Ignored Your Fan Base

• Not having a dedicated plan for handling a fan base team
• Low engagement in product reviews
• People commenting on and sharing your posts frequently without hearing directly from your team

How to Fix It

Set up a fan club with a special newsletter, discount, or other benefits only members have access to. When you need a push of one sort or another, activate that contact list, and reward them handsomely for helping. You may be surprised how well they earn it.

7. No Clear Road to Conversion

There’s a large disconnect between liking or retweeting a post and buying a product from the company that posted it. Some companies never try to find a connection. They consider social media marketing a brand awareness initiative, without even attempting to move directly between engagement and sales. 

It’s easy to set up posts, advertising, and other social media content that leads directly to the content marketing on your website. Once your followers enter that sales funnel, it’s now up to your content and sales teams. But establishing that pipeline early is vital to social media marketing success.

Warning Signs of No Road to Conversion

• Social media activity has no direct impact on sales
• Lack of landing pages for your social media conversions
• No communication between your sales and social media teams

How to Fix It

Build a conversion funnel from the ground up, starting with social media contact. Once you have this version of your customer journey visualized, add whatever content is necessary to your website, social media, and other marketing properties.

8. Being Too One-Size-Fits-All

People spend time on social media because they want to be heard and paid attention to. A generic feed of one-size-fits-all content is the opposite of that. Even if you’re not broadcasting (see above), it can still be off-putting because you alienate portions of your potential audience by never addressing them specifically.

Make a series of posts that speak to different buyers. A social media plan that does this will get the personal, engaged attention of different audience segments. One that doesn’t, risks losing a portion of their audience and market.

Warning Signs of Being Too One-Size-Fits-All

• The same people from your fan base engage with all of your posts
• Similar demographics and other customer details form a disproportionate number of your followers
• Lack of variety in the subject and type of posts you make

How to Fix It

Revisit your customer personas, and identify which content on your feeds is targeted to each. If you find one is getting more consideration than the others, adjust your social media strategy. Aim to have your contact amount reasonably congruent with the market share each persona represents.

Final Thoughts

Your next step should be clear. Run what diagnostics you can to figure out where the problems in your social media plan lie. Once you identify them, work on these problems one at a time. 

Start with the problem you think will be the easiest and least expensive to fix, so you can begin to experience its impact as soon as possible. Once you perfect that one, move on to the next easiest, then the next, until you’ve filled all the holes in your plan, turning it into a powerful modern marketing machine.