Social media is undoubtedly omnipresent. There are about 3.2 billion users worldwide, which is 42 percent of the world’s population!
This may mean a lot to brands pursuing high sales figures and a strong social presence. But the golden rule for success remains the same: they have to engage their audience, who could be anyone from this huge chunk of social media users.
Unfortunately, not many brand owners have been successful enough in achieving this core goal. At the same time, they land up making some mistakes, either knowingly or unknowingly, which can pull down their audience engagement by many folds. You may be making them too.
The first step to overcome the challenge is to become aware of these mistakes and take corrective actions on time wherever necessary. Here are reasons you should know why your social media marketing may be failing to engage your audience:
#1: Not having a social media strategy in place
47 percent of marketers stated that they found it difficult to craft social media strategies to aid their overall business goals. Let’s not blame them. After all, it is indeed a tough job.
It’s easy to flood your feed with posts to catch audiences’ attention, but does that work? Certainly no. You need to have a robust social media strategy in place to ace the game. It’s time-consuming but inevitable a task.
Your social media marketing strategy should clearly state your:
- Marketing Goals
- Target audience
- Tactics
- Time investment
Define these aspects well in advance and stick to a plan dedicatedly to reap the best fruits from social media marketing.
#2: Creating boring posts
Creating irresistible content for social media is harder than most people think. But posting any content just for the sake of posting and staying active is a self-sabotaging mistake that social media marketers commonly make. Boring posts certainly attracts attention, but only for the wrong reasons. Your brand gets recognition for not being able to create any value for audiences.
Lack of visuals, bland language, and repetitive content can turn audiences off and make them go straight for the unfollow option. Social media users look for real interactions and spamming their feed with low-value posts is just a recipe for disaster.
The key here lies in keeping your posts fresh and interesting. You must diversify your content marketing efforts by mixing blogs, videos, photos, and other forms of content. It’s certainly a challenge to come up with new content ideas all the time, but it’s an exercise that social media marketers have to plan and deliberate inevitably. Ultimately, your posts should reflect your audience and their interests for them to engage with it.
#3: Not focusing on the comments section
The comments section is where all the engagement takes place. You don’t want to miss out on something your followers express about your brand, right?
As a social media marketer, you need to focus on building the overall reputation of your brand. For this, you need to track both positive and negative comments without fail.
However, it certainly does not mean that you respond to the positive comments only and ignore the negative ones just because they seem intimidating. In fact, you must take negative feedback as an opportunity to improve because it shows what your audience honestly feels.
Whenever you get negative feedback, engage as early as possible. You must create a response team that will be responsible for making decisions and managing the social channels in times of crisis. Always remember never engage in personal attacks. It can do more harm than good.
#4: Not having a human touch in interactions
Social media marketing is about people communicating and connecting with other people. You cannot afford to be a faceless corporation on this platform that’s so relationship-driven. Instead of being just mere publishers on social media, you must add a human touch to your posts to make them more relatable to your audience.
People following you expect something real, not a response that a typical corporation would provide. When you are responding to a comment on your profile, you must reply with a message that personally addresses your audience, instead of going ahead with something crafted by the PR department.
When an adverse event arises, learn to keep your emotions under control. Let your audience know that you understand their sentiments and you are willing to address the situation. You must stop the blame game and try fixing the problem instead. It’s only by interacting with a human touch that marketers can strike a chord and maintain a base of engaged audiences.
#5: Doing self-promotion that’s more than acceptable
The idea behind social media marketing is to evoke the necessary emotions in people so that they get drawn to your brand. But this does not mean you go out of your way to promote yourself.
If you spend too much time and money on being promotional on social media, then you are likely to lose your followers and your page likes are sure to plummet. Your promotional activities on social media should be subtle, leaving behind a subliminal impression that triggers an emotional response from people.
Social media marketing requires brands to be sociable and expressive, but it requires them to shift from promotional content that people dislike to engaging content that people value.
Your business certainly needs to sell, for which promotional content becomes important. But it should be fitted into a format that people desire. The more social interaction and engagement you can include in your social media posts, the more sales you garner.
#6: Not knowing who genuinely follows
In the first quarter of 2018, there were 583 million fake accounts and 837 million spam posts. So the problem of fake and false social media profiles is very much real and calls for the immediate attention of social media marketers.
Most marketers fail to interact in the best way because they lack “real” followers. Some brands tend to buy followers just to look more popular. There are also some who hold contests with prizes where participants don’t follow your page but are interested in your giveaways.
It’s important to maintain an active profile, but your goals get nullified if you don’t have authentic followers. To avoid this, you must build a slow and steady base of real followers. Pay attention to your targeting strategies, focusing more on people who are most likely to accept your brand. Such people show genuine interest in your offerings and drive your engagement rate higher.
#7: Focusing too much on random automation
Last but certainly not least, relying too much on social media automation could also be a factor contributing towards your page’s lower engagement rates. Throwing backlinks to your social media content and sales promotions can paint a spammy picture of your brand, causing your audience to shun you without a thought.
Just randomly posting backlinks can, therefore, ruin your social media reputation and turn your profile into a spammy landing page that kills your brand’s engagement power.
Automation indeed makes social media marketing a lot easier and faster, but spamming your profile might just ruin your efforts irreparably. These links have nothing real about them. You will have to leverage automation, but you will have to have a well-defined structure doing so.
Bottom line
Achieving stellar social media engagement rates is not a piece of cake for sure. It’s more than just the building of a base of followers across social channels. It’s also about measuring how many people show interest and interacting with your brand regularly.
As such, brands need to stop making the aforementioned mistakes and start strategizing better to attain better marketing exposure and ROI and create greater brand awareness to attract new customers.
Author Bio
Aashish Sarma is a Content Writer at Godot Media, a leading content agency. His interests include social media and content marketing. Writing, travel, music and socializing are his hobbies which he pursues whole-heartedly.