Why Do Social Media Marketing Efforts Fail?

Even after investing millions of rupees in social media marketing, ‘it doesn’t work’ is the common saying of most companies. Everyone wants to make their company’s presence felt and simply jump on the bandwagon and become discouraged by the lack of positive results.

Remember, the errors are grave and would drain all your energy in the wrong direction. In a dynamic world where 2.62 billion people are socially present, an effective social media marketing strategy stands no chance to fail.

Here are some of the common mistakes that you must avoid to realize your full social media potential:

Lack of Social Media Marketing Plan

Without a proper plan of action, social media marketing could be a colossal waste of time. Remember, just as the way you need to figure out your business’s niche, products, and audience, the same way you have to approach your social media marketing strategy.

Executing without a solid marketing plan could suck up hours of the productive time your staff dedicates to it without any return. Come up with well-planned, predefined and measurable goals outlining your budget and specifying what you are trying to accomplish and how would the results be measured.

Vanity Metrics 

Do not fall into the trap of vanity metrics while measuring the key performance indicators. The number of followers on Facebook and twitter does not reveal the success level of your social media marketing. Measure the impact that these efforts have on your business metrics because what really matters is the number of active users, engagement and ultimately revenues and profits.

 

Floating same posts on all accounts

Do not treat all the social media accounts as same. There is a different type of audience at different accounts and floating same messages everywhere would not bring any fruitful results. Addressing the audience in this way would be ineffective and counter productive.

You have a specific target audience and not all the target audiences spend their time on the same platforms. At most, you should be on four social media platforms but channelize your energy and resources on the “Big Three”: Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Failure to engage conversations with the audience

Social media updates are useless if they fail to elicit conversations with your target audience. If there are no responses from the public, your overall strategy and content needs to be revisited. Also, whenever somebody leaves a positive or negative comment, take it as an opportunity to directly interact with the customers and be very humble and personable. To add to it, do not leave social interactions to the marketing department alone, involve other departments as well that interact with the customers, such as customer service, billing, and production, so that they can understand consumer psychology to enhance their experience with your brand.

Invest in paid social media promotions

Unfortunately, it’s really hard to generate engagement for your content on social media. While figuring out a budget for your SMM, leave a room for paid promotions so that your posts receive a better response and add up to your business.

However, do not be tempted to buy followers or pay bots. If you are authentic, put in the hard work, then engagement and audience will follow!

Social media marketing offers an amazing opportunity to directly contact the potential customers and this could be incredibly valuable for the brands. Plan a proper strategy and use the above tips for a serious ROI.