7 Major Blunders Startups Commit In Social Media Marketing-Social media marketing is the battleground for a number of startups that want to make their presence felt in the online business world. If we go by the statistics of Facebook, there are over 50 million business pages on Facebook that belong to the small business.

Now that is tough competition for any startup to survive and if you are one among them then you have to do something that can make your brand stand out in the crowd. Unfortunately, a big number of startups commit serious blunders when it comes to social media marketing that hurt their business in the long run.

For those businesses, we bring here some of the major mistakes that they must avoid in order to survive the cutthroat competition on social media:

1.     Lacking a Plan

First things first.

Just like the other things in your life, successful social media marketing thrives on a good plan. In other words, you need to set your short-term and long-term goals and measure them in terms of quantifiable units. By this, we mean:

• You need to set a target of your Twitter followers that you want to achieve in a month.

• To set a quota of the post that you want to publish on Facebook over the course of a day.

• You need to assign specific pins that you will be doing in a week.

And so on…

All these things are crucial for the success of your social media marketing and they should be included in your marketing plan.

2.     Not Posting At the Right Time | Reviews

It doesn’t benefit your business when you randomly post on different times without considering the peak hours of your target audience. Remember that people on different social media websites behave differently and you have to align your posts according to their timing pattern.

Image Courtesy: www.sproutsocial.com

This graph by Sprout Social shares the right time to post on Twitter. As you can see, the graph highlights the Friday timing between 9 A.M. to 10 A.M. as the best time to tweet a post. On the other hand, it shows Sunday mornings as the worst time to post on Twitter.

This information is crucial for startups that use Twitter as their primary tool to connect with their audience. The crux of this point is that you need to make sure that you set a schedule of your posts so that more people engage with your brand.

3.     Focusing On Only One Platform

Social media is a big world that has millions of people who daily share their posts and engage with businesses. According to Statista, there are more than 5000 millions of active users on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter.

So if you focus only on one social media platform, you will miss out on a large number of people who can be your future clients. But posting on different social media websites will not alone help you win over the competition and you have to create a different strategy for different platform.

For example, Twitter and Facebook are great to share your best articles. By sharing your write-ups on these websites, you can significantly increase your engagement with the audience.

But you cannot achieve the same response of your articles on Instagram. Since it is primarily a photo-sharing website, you need to post the best visuals of your brand, products, and employees to hook the attention of your target buyers.

Remember that every social sharing website has a different flavor and you need to add variety to your content to satisfy the needs of the different audiences on social media.

4.     Not Setting a Frequency of Posts

Sharing random posts on your social media doesn’t help your business. When you publish posts without order, you end up posting too much or too less which confuses your audience.

To get better results of your social media marketing, you need to set a schedule of your posts. Depending on the nature of your business and target audience, you can set a specific schedule. To be more accurate, you need to answer these questions:

• How frequent are my strongest competitors are publishing posts on social media websites?
• What should be an acceptable frequency of posts on a specific social media website?
• How long will my post be shareable on a specific social media website?

Taking into consideration the aforementioned questions, you can create an effective schedule of your social media posts that will generate better results.

5.     Failing To Measure the Results

Remember that social media marketing is a scientific process that you need to measure from time to time. Truly successful small businesses make use of analytics tools to track the results of their social media marketing activities on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

Using analytics tools like Hootsuite Analytics, Twitter Analytics, and Facebook Insights, you can keep a check on the progress of your social media marketing efforts and make timely changes if results don’t show up.

6.     Indulging In Too Much Self Promotion

Self-promotion is good but too much of self-promotion doesn’t help. In fact, it hurts your brand when you keep drumming up your business in every post. Remember that social media marketing focuses more on the needs of your target audience and not just on your own promotion.

Effective social media marketing engages the audience by sharing posts that serve the interests of its target audience. Let’s say you run a SaaS business then you can post articles on benefits of cloud computing, share stories of companies that thrived on using a SaaS service or you can retweet a post of your customers who have praised your business. This will reinforce your authority in your specific niche and attract more people to engage with your brand.

7.     Not Actively Engaging With Your Target Audience

Social media marketing generates results only when you engage with your target audience. In order to connect with people and spread the word of your business, you need to comment on posts of people, reply to their messages, and share their posts. This will help you build a strong engagement with your target audience and they will like to know more about your business.

Social media marketing has the power to skyrocket the visibility of your startup and scale your business. But you can do it only when you avoid the mistakes mentioned in this article.

Author Bio

Kirsten Pike is the director of digital marketing at a 6 Pound Essay small business. In addition, she is a part of an ace team of essay writers UK who can write exceptional academic papers. She is known for her superb blogging skills and astute marketing expertise. In her blog, she shares tips and insights into the different parts of digital marketing. She is also known for her writing chops and has written plenty of ebooks about online business and digital marketing.