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Ready to market your app using social media? Avoid these 13 mistakes

Social media is predominantly helping businesses to reach each user globally.

As per the insights of the Pew Research Centre, over 90% of retail brands are using two or more social media channels, and about half of all the people have at least one active social media account. This makes it clear that social media marketing offers enormous advantages to businesses in terms of awareness, engagement, traffic, and leads if it is done in the right way.

If you do not give attention to this way of marketing, it will drive away all your customers and damage your brand’s reputation.

With good social media strategies and a little common sense, however, you can keep away from voluntary errors.

If you have built an app using AppMySite WooCommerce app builder and are ready to dip your toes in the social media pool, then go through these 13 easily avoidable mistakes.

In this blog

  1. Not having a defined social media strategy
  2. Not using an authentic ‘voice’
  3. Signing up for too many platforms
  4. Letting the wrong people manage your accounts
  5. Posting the same content across every channel
  6. Posting controversial, personal, or insensitive content
  7. Continually promoting your brand
  8. Getting the hashtag thing all wrong
  9. Forgetting the word ‘social’ in social media
  10. Spamming your own followers
  11. Not posting updates when your audience is most active
  12. Not using automated social media management tools
  13. Buying an audience or paying for likes

1. Not having a defined social media strategy

If you are introducing your brand presence on social media channels, you must know the answers of the following questions:

  • How will social media help evolve your overall marketing goals?
  • How will you quantify your social media efforts?
  • Which platforms are more associated with your target audience and social media objectives?

If, however, you blindly jump into social media surroundings, it can lead to a disaster. With every social media channel, you will need to have a policy, a plan, and a quantifiable set of objectives.

Assure that you have a detailed social media strategy before you take a step forward. Also, your strategy must ensure your content is consistent, engaging, and helpful to your brand.

2. Not using an authentic ‘voice’

Humanizing your social media presence helps to create a personal, direct connection with your followers.

Whenever you begin posting and tweeting, think about your brand history and identity, and learn how you can translate that into a social media ‘voice’. Once you have found your authentic voice, use that consistently in all your posts.

Do not go with stuffy or severe tone in your posts just because you are not posting to show your humorous, quirky, and casual side.

Every brand is different. Use your unique voice to increase business growth and boost engagement.

3. Signing up for too many platforms

Having a brand presence on more than one social media platform will likely benefit your business. However, it does not mean that you need to be present on all of them just because you can.

For example: If you are running an accounting firm, it would be a smart move to show your presence on Facebook and LinkedIn, but Pinterest and Instagram probably, will not work for you.

With that said, go with the channels where your target audience is. Simply focus on your efforts to engage your brand’s ideal customers.

4. Letting the wrong people manage your accounts

Social media is a personal expression of your brand voice and reputation. You should take care of it.

If, however, you are allowing everyone to run your social accounts, and controlling the access, you will end up with a disaster.

It does not mean you can never outsource your social media account handlers or rely on a summer intern to manage your posts. Instead, it means that you should implement extreme caution. Also, you need to be sure that you can cut down unauthorized users before they can damage your brand reputation.

5. Posting the same content across every channel

Each social media channel draws a different audience. All the channels have different content requirements. To get the best results, you should tailor your copy to suit each channel. The text included in your content should be interactive, useful, and relevant to your followers.

For example: If you are posting a recent Supreme Court decision for a law firm, it would be appropriate for the LinkedIn page, but probably not for its Facebook page, where people are less technical and likely less interested.

Putting up high-quality pictures, infographics, and videos, however, are the exception to the rule. It is because this type of content performs well across all platforms. However, it is still important to keep your audience in mind.

Remember to write unique blurbs for each post, specific to the platform. Always pay attention to optimal character counts and hashtag preferences for each platform.

6. Posting controversial, personal, or insensitive content

If your business is explicitly religious or political, it would be a good idea to stay away from posting on disruptive topics. You might be excited for a candidate who is standing up in an upcoming election, but a considerable chunk of your audience is probably not. Therefore, keep it to yourself.

Avoid taking a controversial stand if your target audience is united on a particular social issue, or that issue is closely related to your brand.

Many businesses go overboard when it comes to personal content. Also, companies undoubtedly changed their work culture when the millennials entered the workforce. However, there are still boundaries for good social content, and certain personal posts are just out of bounds.

Let’s take the example of baby pictures. You can mark the birth of a staff member’s baby with a cute newborn picture. However, you can only do it if you are in a business that caters to babies. Else, save your baby photos for your personal account.

Keep your social media posts more professional and in good taste for your industry. These posts, moreover, should be related to your business or marketing objectives.

Stay away from criticizing, insensitive, and offensive posts.

7. Continually promoting your brand

Most social media novices think social media marketing is all about putting their brand out in front of the audience. They also believe that over boarding the platforms with a large chunk of posts will be helpful.

Social media, however, is not designed for that. It is all about building relationships with your customers.

It is an ideal place for marketing, not advertising. It does not mean that you can never mention your brand name or promote your products and services.

There is a place for promoting your content, but the non-branded content should far overshadow the branded posts. These branded posts should be engaging, entertaining, and worthy of sharing. Moreover, you need to go easy on call-to-action (CTA).

8. Getting the hashtag thing all wrong

If you are using the wrong hashtags, you might come across all the awful things in the journey of promoting your brand.

Hashtags are useful for the people who are in search for your content. This way, they also help in boosting engagement. With this in mind, you should learn how to use them to your advantage.

Here are a few simple hashtag rules for your reference:

Do not go overboard: Instagram allows 30 hashtags in one post, but you do not go with such number. Many marketers say that there should be an optimal number of hashtags per post (like 6 or 7). If it goes more than that, your user engagement can go down.

Keep your hashtags short, specific, and simple: Use capital words if you want more clarity. Also, do not forget to proofread to avoid embarrassing yourself later.

Use caution in your hashtags: When you are capturing a trending hashtag to promote your brand, make sure that you understand the context.

9. Forgetting the word ‘social’ in social media

Unlike other marketing channels, social media requires regular interaction with your followers. In actuality, give and take is the name of the game. This simply means you should monitor all your social accounts, regularly engage with your audience, and respond promptly to comments and questions.

Monitoring your accounts becomes necessary when you get negative or provocative comments that could affect your brand reputation.

Do not neglect or delete your repulsive feedback. Else, use it as an opportunity to validate your customer service.

Here are some tips and tricks to remember:

Respond to everything: Counter every question or feedback you come across, with reasons. You cannot satisfy the trolls, but you should probably be answering about 90% of your comments and complaints.

Avoid the non-apology apology: Do not give your customers an excuse that you are not finding a good reason that didn’t meet their expectations.

Know when to escalate: Your simple goal is to solve the problem that triggered the complaint, but do not merely address the complainer. If, however, you come across a technical issue, pass it on to your engineers.

Understand when to take a conversation out of the public eye: Comments are open to visible to everyone. If, however, negative comments come in, it will result in a pile-on. You can suggest a direct message to resolve the situation one-on-one if it gets out of control.

Go personalized: Take some time off to personalize your response and avoid automated replies.

10. Spamming your own followers

social media spamming

Yes, you should be active on your social accounts, like from sharing content to updating status regularly. However, you should not overdo it. Else, your followers will turn off.

Find the right balance. It must involve multiple variables, including the size of your audience, for how much time they are active, the channels you post on, and the resources you have to manage your social accounts.

While there is no such rule for the optimal frequency for social media posts, understand what the research shows:

  • Top brands on an average upload one post per day on Facebook
  • User engagement drops just after the third tweet per day
  • Posting 20 times per month on LinkedIn reaches 60% of the audience
  • Posting five or more times daily on Pinterest increases user engagement
  • On an average, posting 1.5 times per day on Instagram appears to have no downside

11. Not posting updates when your audience is most active

You have spent a substantial amount of time creating amazing content. Therefore, posting it when it is likely to be seen would give you better results.

According to marketing research, posting when your audience is active on social media can boost your engagement by 30% or more.

Luckily, you can figure out the best time to post on each channel on HubSpot’s articles. With these articles, you can find all the information you need to reach your social audience at the optimal time.

12. Not using automated social media management tools

With reference to the last two mistakes, you are probably wondering how you will manage to post at the right time of a day, in the right frequency on each of your social channels.

To get the best results, you need to handle each of your social media channels proficiently.

With that being said, many online tools can help to schedule your posts. Other tools also offer social listening, analytics, and reporting to augment user engagement. Some of the tools come free, while others offer affordable monthly plans with ample extra features.

Read on to know some of the best multiplatform:

Hootsuite: This tool has a complete suite of social management tools, including scheduling, analytics, social listening, and RSS feeds. These tools further help in connecting with 35 different social apps.

Buffer: This is a multiplatform scheduling tool that comes with powerful analytics and a browser extension for posting.

Sprout Social: This is an engagement and management platform with a Smart Inbox that routes all your social media posts into a single filterable stream.

Here are some of the best tools for single platform management:

TweetDeck: This is a free tool for anyone with a Twitter account.

SocialOomph: This is a tool for organizing Twitter accounts with optional Facebook features.

Friends+Me: This is a free tool to manage your Google+ account.

SocialBro: This is a tool to target and engage your Twitter audience.

13. Buying an audience or paying for likes

social media likes

A large number of followers and a pile of likes ratify your social proof. However, it only helps in building your app visibility if your audience is genuine and have got organic likes.

If you pay to get more users, it does not boost the engagement, improve ROI, or help you build relationships. But it is a desperate tactic, and can even damage your brand and legitimate social accounts.

Conquer the world of social media

Consider avoiding these mistakes once you have built your app via WooCommerce app builder as it can damage your brand reputation.

Do not forget to monitor, measure, and analyse your efforts. Also, make sure you are driving traffic, reaching the right people, and seeing a good return on your social media investment.

If, by any chance, you are looking for options to build a mobile app, visit AppMySite to make your own native app in a code-free environment.

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