Are you making these common mistakes with your social media strategy? 
Mistake 1: Assuming that consumers follow you to have a “relationship.” Most don’t. The vast majority of consumers follow brands on social media to get discounts. Only two out of ten consumers follow brands to have a relationship (these are the hard-core evangelists that really like a brand) and eight out of ten really want a deal.
Many brands with social media sites spend a lot of time trying to build relationships with their followers but a lot of these marketers are actually spinning their wheels. To maximize your ROI and total reach on social media, have a strategy to reach out to your brand evangelists as well as a strategy to give the majority of your followers what they really want: a deal.
Mistake 2: Contacting your customers or followers too much. Early on, many marketers saw increased revenue by sending more emails. Simple…send more emails, revenue goes up. That evolved into contacting customers too much in the inbox or creating excessive irrelevant online activity, creating overload. Worse than overload, it causes customers to disengage (or unsubscribe) from your brand. More is not always better! Arthur Middleton Hughes, a guru of database marketing, did a study that showed a direct relationship between a higher volume of emails sent per month and substantially lower open rates.
If you have lower open rates for your emails than you did a year ago, are you sending too many emails?
Mistake 3: Using quantity, not quality, to build customer relationships. As we mentioned above, merely trying to interact with your followers more frequently is not the way to build relationships. Brands that have the most engaged followers do that with shared values, not simply a higher volume of interactions. What does your brand stand for, and how does your social media activity connect that to customers that share the same value? In other words, if your brand is all about increasing performance in Yugos, then your activity on social media sites should completely reinforce that. What values do you share with your customers?
Mistake 4: Making it all about you. A study conducted by Facebook showed that the most engaging posts are about subjects related to your brand, not necessarily about your brand. Facebook found the following results: If your goal is to generate shares, then post on topics related to your brand or use photos, photo albums and videos. If your goal is to generate “likes,” then post on topics related to your brand with a clear call to action, for example “Like this if…” If your goal is to generate comments, then post on topics related to the brand and ask a question in the post.
We have to give credit to a lot of sources for today’s trend so for more information read the Harvard Business Review, Facebook Studio, Database Marketing Institute and Pointer Media Network.
Tomorrow is exactly five weeks before the SEMA Show and AAPEX open so check back for 5 Facts About Consumers Reading Emails on Smartphones.
