While many businesses would love to have a full-fledged marketing team with a perfect strategy, this is not the case for all companies, especially for start-ups. Social media marketing seems like it would be an easy feat, but once you become involved with it, you realize just how many details are involved with it. Whether you are a newbie to marketing or have poured many years into a marketing career, it is important to understand the common social media marketing mistakes that are made and how you can stop yourself from making the same mistakes.

Ignoring Comments

Depending on the size of your company and your existing social media audience, it can seem overwhelming to respond to comments at times, especially if you average a high amount of them. However, ignoring these comments can make your business seem stand-offish and unengaged, which is never a quality that drives more sales. It is essential to take the time to respond to comments, especially those that may be asking a question or even making a complaint known. There is no need to respond to every comment if you have over one hundred of them on your post, but you should at least put effort into responding to a few of these and liking some others. Comments such as “love this pic” do not warrant a response as much as ones that say, “What time are you open on this holiday?” Use discernment in which comments you respond to, but make sure you are not ignoring all of them altogether.

Not Differentiating Your Content on Channels

There is such a thing as lazy social media marketing, which usually means that a company is copying and pasting a post from one social channel to all their others. It can be time-consuming to craft individual posts, but this will help add more character to your pages and possibly increase engagement. Your followers do not want to see the exact word-for-word posts on all their different channels. If this is the case, many might decide to unfollow you. Instead, think of ways that you can later repurpose content, but do not assume that just because a post did well on Instagram that it will also do well on Twitter on the same day.

Too Much Promotion

While social media marketing is meant to be another funnel of advertising, it is discouraged to do it too often. Your social media pages should be an extension of your brand, not just a place to post promotion after promotion. While promotional content is good from time to time, most experienced marketers recommend the 80/20 rule, meaning that 80% of your content should be useful to your audience while the other 20% should be used to promote your business. You might think this is counterintuitive, but it will actually end up driving more followers to your page. Social media users do not open their apps to be bombarded with promotional content. They enjoy seeing a sale from time to time, but they are most likely using it for entertainment or to learn something new. Capitalize on this by using your social media to offer value to your followers.