In this blog, we talk about nine main social media mistakes we want to help your business avoid! The 9 mistakes are:

1. Posting Content Your Audience Doesn’t Care About
2. Spending Time On The Wrong Platform
3. Posting Inconsistently and Giving Up Quickly
4. Keeping Your Social Media Separate From The Rest Of Your Content Marketing
5. Not Branding Your Social Media Content
6. Relying On Organic Reach Alone
7. Not Leveraging Video
8. Thinking You Have To Have A Huge Audience In Order To Make Money
9. Not Empowering Your Followers To Help You Grow Your Brand

Even Elevate’s founder, Katie McNamee has been apprehensive in the past about implementing more video on social media (see Mistake #7), but once we looked into the statistics of it, she knew it was totally worth putting the effort in! Check out her thoughts below:

Mistake #1: Posting content your audience doesn’t care about. 

Since social media is such a great place to promote your business, we see companies make this mistake: only posting promotional content that’s goal is to sell their businesses or services. And when you’re only trying to sell your services (instead of engaging your audience), you’re going to find that people will quickly lose interest. 

A more successful strategy for social media is to engage your audience and create content that they look forward to seeing! At a high level, you can do this by:

• Keeping watch of trends in your industry. 
• Studying your content and seeing what performs best. 
• Watching, listening, and then pivoting your social media strategy to reach your target marketing better. 
• Listening and responding to your audience instead of telling them everything you think they’d want to know. 

 Specifically, on posts, this might look like:

• Asking questions in your posts to get your audience interested
• Running polls in your Facebook or Instagram stories or on Twitter
• Going live to communicate directly with your audience
• Directly asking your audience what they want to see more of

Mistake #2: Spending your time on the wrong platform.

Your business has a lot of social media platforms to choose from, such as: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, Reddit, and more. 

We have seen businesses that are ramping up their social media presence rapidly dive into multiple platforms at once. Usually, they attempt to maintain all the platforms for a while after seeing limited traction and feeling overwhelmed (See: Mistake 3.) 

One reason they might not be gaining traction is that they aren’t using the right platform for their target audience. As an example, Pinterest reaches 83% of US women aged 25-54. So if you’re marketing a product to men over 65+, you might not want to choose this option. 

You should also consider what platform best fits your product or service. Do you have captivating videos and pictures from customer experiences? Instagram would be a great choice. Do you like to give your customers little bits of insight into your business? Twitter’s 280 character-limit might fit you well. 

So as a quick recap, before diving into a social media platform, consider if it fits your target marketing and your type of business. 

Mistake #3: Posting inconsistently and giving up quickly. 

I have come across too many social media profiles of businesses that have given up. Until we resurrected our social media platforms in 2020, Elevate Online’s own Facebook sat quiet and aging, a time capsule from 2018. 

Giving up on social media or devoting sporadic time to it can happen for many reasons. 

Usually, the reasons are: 

• You don’t see enough value from social media to keep you going
• You don’t have the time, energy, or money to devote to it
• Some combination of the two above

But here’s the thing about succeeding at social media. It takes consistency and time to grow your following. Sometimes you can see fast results, especially when you create content that resonates with your target audience.

But overall, at Elevate, we recommend making sure that you choose the best social media platform or platforms for your business and then commit to posting content on them regularly. 

To start, you might only be able to commit to three posts per week. But, keep to that commitment. When you begin to gain traction, set your sights on four posts. Then five. Create a system that suits you; watch what content performs well, pivot, and repeat.   

Mistake #4: Keeping your social media separate from the rest of your content marketing. 

You should fully integrate your social media strategy with the rest of your content marketing. Your content marketing strategy includes channels like email, blogging, social media, influencer marketing, and beyond. 

When all your content marketing channels are working together in harmony, it is a beautiful (and effective) thing. For instance, you write a blog and promote it in an email and a snippet on social media. Someone on social media sees that and signs up for your newsletter. They receive your next sale email and become a paying customer. 

When thinking about your social media strategy, consider how you can leverage what is already working with your overall content marketing strategy. Then purposefully find ways to make sure you’re sharing similar information, messaging, and news across your multiple channels. 

Mistake #5: Not branding your social media content. 

Branding is an essential part of any business, online or in person. Just as you would not have each room of your business painted with totally different color schemes, you wouldn’t want each page of your website to have a different personality. Your business should have a cohesive experience from start to finish, including your social media.

Here’s what we mean: overall, your posts should have a defined look or feel that your customers associate with you and represents your business well. 

We aren’t saying you HAVE to hire a professional graphic designer or can’t post a picture if it doesn’t have your brand colors. But, you should find a way to brand your photos so that there’s no mistake that it either came from you or represents you well.

Using Social Media Branding Tools Correctly

Using tools like Canva can make your social media look more professional, branded, and designed. However, using a plain Canva template that works with your content without tweaking it to fit your brand’s colors, logo, and personality is not a good way to brand yourself online. 

Make sure that if you use Canva (or any other graphic design website) templates, you design them in a way that looks good with your other posts by using brand colors, logo, adding your business’s personal photos, and of course, adding your brand’s personality. 

It may take trial and error to figure out what look you want, but once you decide, your social feed will look and feel just as well-designed as your website or brick and mortar business. 

Mistake #6: Relying on organic reach alone. 

Unfortunately, organic reach is getting harder and harder to acquire because of algorithm changes within social media websites. Social media used to be purely social, but site creators have monetized them with advertisements. As a result, businesses who want to gain traction now need to pay to play. 

Here are some statistics you might find surprising about Facebook and Instagram: 

Facebook Organic Reach & Engagement:

The average organic reach for a Facebook post in 2020 is only 5.5%, a drop of 2.2% from 2019, (Hootsuite). Organic growth is even harder to accumulate when you consider that the organic growth potential drops every year. In 2012, organic growth potential on Facebook was 16% and dropped to 2.27% by 2015. The average engagement rate for Facebook posts is 3.6% (Hootsuite), but the average engagement for businesses is 0.216% (Social Insight).

Instagram Organic Reach & Engagement:

In keeping with the pay to play idea, ad revenue is a huge component of social sites. In 2019, almost 25% of Facebook’s total ad revenue was expected to come from Instagram, and their share of that revenue is expected to grow to 30% globally in 2020 (Recode). 

Keep in mind that this doesn’t mean you should go out and buy followers (please don’t, actually). But it does mean you should consider using social media ads, boosting posts, leveraging influencer marketing, and more. 

Mistake #7: Not leveraging video.

We have seen video gaining precious organic traction and performing well as paid ads on social media websites for several years. We expect this trend will continue. 

If your brand is not utilizing video, you could be missing out on views, engagement, and growth opportunities. 

Even Elevate’s founder, Katie McNamee has been apprehensive in the past about implementing more video on social media, but once we looked into the statistics of it, she knew it was totally worth putting the effort in! Check out her thoughts below:

Here are some surprising statistics about leveraging videos online and in your social media:

Videos Online:

• 6 out of 10 people would rather watch online videos than television. (Google)
• Viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video, compared to 10% when reading it in text. (Insivia)
• 92% of users watching video on mobile will share it with others. (Wordstream)

Video on social media:

• 72% of customers would rather learn about a product or service by way of video. (HubSpot)
• Social media posts with video have 48% more views. (HubSpot)
• 62% said they were more interested in a product after seeing it in a Facebook Story. (Marketing Land)
• Social video generates 1200% more shares than text and image content combined. (G2 Crowd)
• Video promotions are now equally as popular as photo promotions on Facebook. (Socialbakers)
• Video campaigns on LinkedIn have 50% view rates. (LinkedIn)
• 64% of consumers will make a purchase after watching branded videos on social platforms. (Tubular Insights)
• The average engagement rate for Facebook video posts is 6.13% (Hootsuite). The average engagement rate on FB overall is 3.6%.

Using video can get you more likes, engagement, and shares on social media. If you’re looking for ways to incorporate video into your digital marketing efforts, contact us for a free consultation!

Mistake #8: Thinking you have to have a huge audience in order to make money. 

Some businesses think that there’s no point in putting time and energy into their social media if they don’t have a considerable following. 

After all, the only way to make money or generate leads from social media is to have a huge follower base, so the best way to fix this is to buy followers, right?

Work hard to attract your niche audience who will be loyal to your brand and get excited about your products and services. Engaging the right small audience (or even using ad money to attract the right audience) will always work in your favor over trying to accumulate a large wrong audience.

Mistake #9: Not empowering your followers to help you grow your brand. 

Social media allows your customers to share how much they love your brand, but it does not always happen on its own. In fact, you should be encouraging it and finding ways to empower your followers to share about you. 

One way you can do this is by stimulating user-generated content (UGC.) According to learn.g2.com, “User-generated content (UGC) is any type of content – videos, images, blog posts, testimonials, social posts, reviews, and other media – that is created by an unpaid consumer and is publicly available for others to view.”

There are many ways you can empower your followers to create content for you and expand your reach. 

Your business could:

• Hold a giveaway that requires a type of UGC to enter
• Ask your followers to share about your business on social media via an email, highlighting how important it is for you
• Include a card with your products that tells people how they can share about you on social media and use a unique hashtag for the chance to be featured on your profile
• Provide a reward for sharing UGC on their personal social media profiles, such as an in-store discount or coupon code for individuals who share your business on social media 

Thrive on social media. 

Are you interested in learning more about how social media can help your business thrive? Schedule a free consultation with Elevate Online’s founder, Katie McNamee.