5 Mistakes that can Turn Your Social Media Strategy Into a Snooze Fest

Social media spending is on the rise. Many businesses are assigning a large portion of their marketing budgets to social media and for good reason. Businesses making concerted efforts to leverage social media for reaching out to their target audience are experiencing tangible returns.

While there is no doubt your brand needs a social strategy to boost growth, the truth is social media is a hard taskmaster. If you are not at the top of your game, your social strategy won’t deliver the results you are looking for.

It will be a wasted effort, an absolute snooze fest that puts its target audience to sleep.

One of the ways you can ensure your strategy doesn’t deliver disastrous results is by avoiding certain mistakes. Let’s see what they are:

Muddled Socializing

If you are one of those businesses, spending six hours or more on social media, and still finding it tough to get anything out of it, you probably are running a muddled social media campaign that is neither here nor there.

An unorganized campaign means all that time you are spending on social media is proving to be ineffective. One reason for this could be that you are spending more time managing your social accounts rather than using this time to have a solid conversation with your target audience. You might be spending a large percentage of your time updating your social accounts, which means you have very little time left to engage with your audience.

Social media encourages dialogue and it is this two way conversation that can lead to active brand engagement. If all you are doing is posting updates, the followers on your networks will fall asleep.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, you might be having a conversation one too many, and are unable to keep track of conversations that will bring value to your business in any way or form. What’s more, your conversations might lack depth, again a reason for the snooze fest.

So, start bringing order to chaos. Get efficient.

There are plenty of social media tools you can use to enhance the efficacy of various activities that are a part of your social media campaign. Pick the right tools to get the benefit you are looking for.

Ignoring the content mix

Think very carefully; have you been engaging with your followers through text-heavy content?

If the answer is yes, you have identified another reason why your social campaign can’t seem to generate any interest about your brand. A social media campaign that relies on very few content formats is a recipe for disaster.

If you want to reach out to your followers and trigger value added conversations with them, it’s important that an optimum mix of content drips through your social networks.

Kevan Lee of Buffer points to the fact that nearly two-thirds of the updates on social are visual. That’s because social media users are inclined to share/repost visuals. That’s what they are interested in. So, give them what they want.

Without those visuals, your social updates are like sleeping pills. The only good reason for your fans or followers to absorb your updates is for self-sedation.

Lack of sustained ‘engagement’

At any given time during a week, how many hosted Twitter chats do you participate in? How do you do “social small talk”? What’s your strategy for engagement and how do you go about it?

If you are not doing any of these things, or doing them once in a while or not doing them right- you are slowly killing your social media strategy.

Engagement on Twitter, for instance, would mean going all out into conversations, sharing your knowledge/expertise, sharing interesting information, and creating lists to mark a few special sets of people who you want to engage with.

Doing it right is all about the strength of your engagement, positivity, and genuine outreach. It’s about making real connections.

The “Me Me” Syndrome

Is your brand afflicted with the “Me Me” syndrome – the ugly habit of being so inwards focused that you rarely take time out to share others’ content, have conversations, or forge real relationships.

You’ll be surprised to know that some very popular brands, products, and services have social accounts with zero real engagement.

The “Me Me” syndrome doesn’t just start and end with social updates. It stretches all the way back to the way your website is designed, how the copy on this website and landing pages is written, and the super self-centered blog posts that share nothing else but “how awesome our product is”.

If all that you do is put up updates about yourself, your business, your products, and your services, stop it now. That’s not going to work. That’s going to put your target audience to sleep.

Unreasonable Expectations

Is your business‘s social media campaign losing steam quickly?

Why, you ask?

That’s because your expectations were wrong in the first place. If you got on social thinking that it’s your premium door to quick business, you will be disappointed.

If you expected a huge follower base, you’d be disappointed again. Here are a few tips that will help sort out your expectations from social media:

• Social is not where you should sell.
• You’ll take time build a reputation and earn respect. You’ll not get anything by the end of the day, today.
• A “huge” follower base is a vanity metric. It’s worth nothing.
• Not all social networks are built equal.
• Dependence on any one single social network is foolishness.

Once you get your expectations right, the results will follow.

Create a bank of questions, curate content, and use Neil Patel’s “Collect and keep” system of curating interesting and relevant content.

Whatever you do, take the focus off ‘you’ and put it out there on social media.

Life’s good on social, but unless you are looking where you ought to, you will miss the party.