Social Media marketing is one of many digital marketing services that can drive a significant amount of traffic to your website and get more brand awareness with your target demographic. It’s a great tool for engaging with your followers and potentially reaching a new audience. In the world of social media, there are lots of best practices you can implement to get the most out of your pages. Here are some of the most common things businesses get wrong on their social media pages, and how you can avoid them:

Not Posting When Your Followers Are Active

A common mistake businesses make on social media is posting content when their followers are not active. When you are on social media platforms, that doesn’t mean your followers are- and it’s important that you find the sweet spot for various social media platforms. Posting too late or too early can drastically affect your reach and engagement. Platforms tend to report on their highest activity times, and it is definitely something to pay attention to. Additionally, Business Analytics are available on platforms like Instagram. Here, you can easily break down your audience by demographics, and most active times through the day and week.

Posting Too Often or Too Little

A lot of businesses on social media take one of these two approaches, but they can tend to have negative effects on your engagement and reach. Posting too often can overwhelm your audience, and may lead to them unfollowing your business. Posting too little can tell social media algorithms to not push your content as much, which may lead to your audience not seeing your content and very little social media growth.

Using The Wrong Hashtags Or No Hashtags At All

Hashtags are like your search engine keywords, it’s the most likely source of getting new visitors to your pages organically! Oftentimes, businesses do not have a strategy for generating hashtags to optimize their content. It is important to have a healthy mix of hashtags, but ones that make sense for your content. For example, using hashtags like #marketing, #christmas, or #love has millions of posts, so the chance of someone seeing and engaging with your content is next to none. Using hashtags with a smaller number of posts will increase your chances of engagement and can lead to your content trending for that topic, especially if your account is smaller.

Following Too Many Accounts/ Buying Followers

When looking at a business account, I tend to look at the ratio of followers/following and the average rate of engagement per post. Generally speaking, it is a good rule of thumb to keep your following number well below your followers. On social media platforms it is better to have a smaller number of devoted followers that love your brand then a large number of followers that don’t care about it.

The biggest mistake you can make for your social media pages is to buy followers. If your accounts have thousands of followers, but only a small number of engagements per post, it will definitely de-legitimize your business. It can also help social engagement to get rid of these bot-followers. Need help finding some of them? Typing numbers into your followers search bar can lead you to inactive accounts that mass follow businesses and people on social platforms. Deleting these accounts will help your engagement rate overall.

Deleting Negative Comments

This is a huge no-no for businesses and will only lead to more issues down the road. It is a good practice to reach out to these comments directly with sympathy, understanding and a desire for resolution. People can be more likely to leave bad comments about businesses than good ones, and these customers will make their opinion louder if they feel like they are not being heard. It can be hard to have these tough conversations out in the open on social media for the world to see, but there are customers who will take the time to read your responses and who will appreciate them.

Not Humanizing Your Business

People who use social media don’t want to feel like they are always being solicited to. If every post your business makes is about a sale, or why your product is the best- it might not resonate with your customers well. Chances are, your social media followers will already know how great your product is because they are past customers!

Diversifying your content will allow you to reach more people and help keep them engaged. Try engaging with your audience in thoughtful prompts, educational graphics and varying visuals (with human-sounding captions!). Need some ideas or tips on photography? Check out our blog post on how you can improve your photography content.

Growing your social media accounts is all about figuring out what works by trial and error! Find what speaks to your audience the most and what keeps them coming back to engage with your content. You can also check out these Social Media Marketing trends for inspiration on your next post. Organic growth takes time to achieve but is greatly beneficial to the long term growth of your business!