4 Social Media Marketing Mistakes Every New Business Makes (And How To Avoid Them)

Social media can be a challenging yet rewarding platform to work on. It’s where your audience spends several hours a day, making it a significant place to find customers and boost your brand image.

However, approaching people on social media is different from how you use email marketing or how you leverage content on your site.

Your social media strategy has to stand on its own while meeting overall business goals. It’s easy to make mistakes when starting a new business and launching your social media marketing plan. You can overlook important steps and processes.

To help you make the right decisions from the beginning, let’s look at some common mistakes new businesses make.

By being aware of these missteps, you’ll be able to start your own social media strategy on the right foot.

Content Inconsistency

It’s important to be consistent when you create and publish content on social media. You need to make posts regularly and also maintain quality standards for your content.

Posting Regularly

Many businesses think that’s enough to come up with content on the spur of the moment and to post something every day. Such content is often poor in quality, and one may end up forgetting to post on time, leading to rushed content.

It’s essential to create a content calendar ahead of time with your content charted out. You’ll never miss a day or fail to leverage important seasonal events.

You also need to make sure that you post more than once a day, especially on platforms like Twitter. Your audience is likely to be from different parts of the country and the world. They are on social media at different times.

While you don’t want to come across as spammy and posting too often, you also don’t want to miss people who come online at other times. Try to post at different times of the day and look at when you get the most engagement.

You can recycle your current content and repost evergreen content that’s useful over time. Having a content calendar and use social media management tools can make it easier to post regularly. You can automate and schedule your posts, which frees you up to engage with customers.

A social media management tool can publish content automatically

Having an Inconsistent Aesthetic

A common mistake a business makes is to create content that’s inconsistent in its appearance. Your content’s look and feel play a key role in branding. It’s important to establish a tone, a persona, color combinations, and other details in advance.

In this way, you’ll ensure that all your images, videos, and other material use the same fonts, colors, and styles of communication. Your audience will associate content with your brand and make it more memorable.

Consistent aesthetics can impact brand memorability

Posting the Same Content to All Platforms

It’s not necessary to post entirely different content for each social media platform. However, it is a mistake to post the exact same material to your LinkedIn page and to Instagram.

Each social media platform is different and your audience interacts with content differently as well.

You can create content that contains the same message for all your social media pages. But make sure that you tweak your posts to suit each platform. Doing research will help you understand your audience and the best type of content to use on each platform.

Not Doing Your Research

Doing research will ensure that your social media activities lead to the best outcome for your business. Research gives you powerful insights on how to best leverage social media.

Research the best platform for you: When you’re creating content for social media, you need to understand the right platform for your business. Some popular platforms may give you little to no engagement or conversions because it’s unsuitable for your industry. Your audience may also not be active in such places.

Understand your audience: Audience research is essential to help you create content that appeals to them. It’s important to find out demographic information, as well as interests. All social media platforms have insights and analytics services to make this possible. You can also use surveys to ask your audience to give you helpful feedback and information.

Find influencers: Working with influencers can jumpstart your reach online. It’s helpful to do research on influencers in your domain. They can help you connect with their audience, and collaborate by holding giveaways and other activities.

Content research: Content curation and research tools will help you determine the right formats for each platform. For example, you may find that how-to videos and lists will do great on Facebook, but that you should leverage hashtag campaigns on Twitter.

Doing research takes the guesswork out of your marketing efforts. It makes it possible to get better results in your activities. You can also set up benchmarks to measure the effectiveness of your work.

Platforms like Facebook offer data and analytics

No Metrics for Performance

It’s important to set smart goals to help you measure and track how your marketing efforts are going. Without any metrics in place or a measurement plan, you won’t know what’s working and what’s not.

Measuring your social media activities ensures that you measure the right things. It lets you have a timeline for results so that you don’t expect unrealistic results in a short time frame.

By setting up clear metrics ahead of time, you also make sure that you’re not tracking too many things. Use business tools that are available with all social media platforms to help you track what matters.

Start Your Social Media Activities on the Right Foot

You can grow your business on social media when you use it the right way. It’s vital to have a clear strategy in place and to measure the outcomes of your activities.

By avoiding the mistakes outlined here, your business will launch and win over followers from the get-go.