Social media is one of the most powerful marketing tools for businesses that can easily help you reach your conversion goals.
However, many marketers don’t know how to properly use these social platforms to promote their brand and get effective results. So, they end up committing mistakes that can cost them reach, engagement, and even customers.
But after all the hard work and money you put into establishing your business, you can’t afford that to happen.
That’s why it’s important for you to know how to use it right and draw good engagement, target the right audience, and boost your conversions to maximize your ROI.
You can simply start by avoiding the following mistakes that most marketers commonly make.
1. Buying Followers
Buying fake followers on social media is one of the biggest mistakes that most marketers commit. If you’ve done it in the past or are planning to do it, you should reconsider your plan.
Buying fake followers is a number game in which you only get to choose the numbers and not the followers. For example, you buy 1500 followers for $5. But you don’t know which followers you’ll have.
The moment you pay the money, your followers will instantly increase. But the problem is that out of all the 1500 followers, most of them are fake accounts.
This means you don’t even know if there’s a face behind the account. Buying fake followers becomes meaningless for your marketing strategy because it doesn’t really add anything to your marketing efforts.
And even if these followers aren’t fake, most of them aren’t interested in your business since they aren’t following you willingly. In other words, they are not your target audience, so it doesn’t matter to them what your business is about. This means, even if you appear in their feed, they’ll just ignore you.
If you don’t want that to happen, stop buying followers on social media.
Another big mistake that many marketers often make is to use irrelevant hashtags. The main purpose of using hashtags on social media, especially on Instagram, is to make your content more discoverable. It helps you increase your audience and create brand awareness.
Using irrelevant hashtags, on the other hand, can have a negative impact on your brand. If a user follows the hashtag you’ve used and finds out that the content isn’t relevant, they might report you for misleading them.
If too many users report your content as irrelevant, a red flag will be raised on your account, and your content will be negatively impacted too.
3. Ignoring Comments
If you have been ignoring the comments you receive on your social media accounts, you need to pay attention to them now. Comments are a powerful way of interacting with your followers and potential customers.
When people comment on your posts, they want you as the brand to address their concerns, clear their doubts, or simply acknowledge them.
According to research, 40% of people who reach out to brands on social media for customer support expect an answer within 60 minutes.
Replying to comments on social media makes your brand more human, and people find it easier to connect with you. Also, people are more likely to buy from you if they see you engaging with them through comments.
4. Being Inconsistent
If you want to use social media to its fullest potential, you have to be consistent. By doing so, you can appear on your follower’s feed more frequently. This will strengthen your brand by increasing brand familiarity. It’s also a great way of building credibility and increasing trust.
When that happens, people won’t mind buying from you. So it becomes easier for you to convert your leads into sales. More visibility also encourages your audience to engage with your brand through likes, shares, and comments.
When you get more engagement on your posts, platforms like Instagram might even consider placing your posts on the top of your follower’s feed, which again is a wonderful way of attracting more engagement and visibility.
5. Not Curating User-Generated Content
One of the main reasons why you should curate user-generated content is its ability to serve as a powerful social proof. By encouraging your customers to share their experiences of using your products, you give them a chance to narrate their happy experiences with your brand.
This is a very smart way of building brand credibility. People believe in such content more than they believe in ads and promotional content generated by the brand itself.
Such content is more convincing because the user doesn’t have any ulterior motives in creating them. It’s just an expression of how satisfied they are with your products. So it helps you build credibility for your business.
Another benefit of using user-generated content is that people in the world of social media are easy to influence. When they see nice and vibrant pictures of others using your products, they might be influenced to buy them too. So it is also a wonderful way of boosting your sales.
6. Not Going Live
Going live on social media is a great way of interacting with your audience. So if you haven’t done it yet, you should start doing it now.
It gives you the opportunity to engage with your audience in real-time and has a one-on-one conversation with them.
You can use it to have a Q&A session to know what their expectations are. You can then use this insight to improve your business by making relevant changes that are suggested by your followers.
That way, you can offer what your customers want and improve your products and services too.
Social media is one of the most popular and widely used marketing tools in current times. But not everyone knows how to use it effectively for the best results. This can only hamper your brand than doing any good.
If you, too, are a social media marketer, make sure that you know what mistakes to avoid. This will help you benefit from your marketing strategy by gaining more engagement, boosting your sales, increasing your followers, and reaching your conversion goals.
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