Top Social Media Marketing Mistakes

Most larger companies who have a large marketing department seem to have social media marketing down to a “t”, but those smaller business’ seem to struggle. When it comes to social media marketing, most companies and business’ do use the multiple online platforms to widen their audience but many do it wrong, and here are the top social media marketing mistakes -

They have no Social Media plan - This is a typical mistake, the company has the idea of starting a social media marketing strategy for their company and they add a profile image, a link to their site and post a few updates. Now what? This is where a plan would come in handy, to help you when you run out of idea’s – ultimately having a plan would eradicate the pausing of the marketing strategy.
Having no or the wrong content strategy - You must have enough interesting, relevant and valuable content in your stream every day that is interesting, relevant and valuable to your audience. Not enough or the wrong content will miss the mark on actions, comments and relationship building. Content leads to conversations, conversations build relationships and relationships drive ROI.
Forgetting it requires hard work – Social media requires constant work – constant updates and constant communication with your following to keep them involved and interested. You need to give your following a reason to continue following you as well as promoting your work.
Talking about themselves too much - Your following don’t want to hear that much about you and your company – companies and individuals need to share great stuff from others at least 80% of the time so they can earn the right to talk about themselves without turning their audience off.

Using the Social platforms as a broadcasting tool and not a communication and conversation starter – This point applies to business’ as well as individuals – using your social media platforms as a way of posting updates without communicating is another big mistake. Communicating and taking part in what your following are talking about also helps to promote yourself and display the fact you could be an expert in your field.
Forgetting to be human - If you look around the social media platforms you might notice that many streams are simply filled with updates and boring status, or even repeated status’. This is down to those companies and individuals having their social streams on auto pilot.
Ignoring comments, reply’s, status update’s etc. - Big companies may have a large budget to starting and running a social media marketing strategy, but it is startling to see how many of these companies forget to reply or communicate with those who get in touch with these business’ via Facebook or Twitter.

Do you commit any of these mistakes or have you witnessed any other’s that we have not mentioned that we can add to our top social media marketing mistakes list?