Social media marketing is something that everyone is doing now. Be it an established business or a small local business. Everyone wants to jump on the bandwagon of making their brand presence felt on social networks. The simple reason being; that’s where the crowd is. However, there are some common social media marketing mistakes that most marketers make.

As with all mistakes, the first step is becoming aware of them; then you will be able to avoid those mistakes. So, here are the top social media marketing mistakes that you should not make in your marketing:

1. Failing to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy

Just as you need to figure out your business’s niche, product, and audience, so too do you have to approach your social media marketing strategy. Many companies might have executed without a solid social media strategy and you could be one of them.

So the first step is to have a social media marketing strategy.

The social media marketing plan should be such that it should build on your presence and not let it dwindle. What is your goal in using social media? To gain likes and followers? Why? To create a new source of sales leads? To strengthen your brand’s authority? If you don’t know what your goal is, you won’t reach it. Any social media marketing strategy would need:

• Goals
• Target audience
• Tactics
• Time investment
• Team

2. Dealing with Social Media Negative Feedback

Nine out of ten brands make this mistake. Whenever a negative comment pops up, they come up with a lame excuse when in addressing it in social media. Everyone fears that negative feedback would spoil their reputation. That is one of the great risks in social media. But instead of apologizing or ignoring negative comments, brands should see it as an opportunity to improve. Social media offers a great chance to start a conversation with the person who dropped the feedback.

When you face negative feedback engage as early as possible. Create a response team who will be responsible for decisions and who will manage the social media channels during the crisis. Never engage in personal attacks. And most importantly, don’t panic.

3. Promoting yourself a lot

Social media is all about being sociable and communicating. People hate promotional content, and they detest adverts. If you spend too much time being promotional, then you are going to lose followers and likes on social media. Promotion needs to be used subtly on social media.

Of course, your business needs to sell. Every now and then it’s totally OK to post promotional material. However, the more engagement and social interaction you can include in those posts the more sales you get.

4. Very Little Interaction

In many cases, profiles have updates but no participation in the conversation. Lack of conversation with your clients and followers decreases the value of your social presence, and you don’t build on valuable relationships. You can use social media as banner space, but in reality, “social” is about conversations and engagement.

5. No Real Followers

Very little interaction can be a result of no real followers. Some people buy followers just to look better. Some hold contests with prizes like iPads and iPhones where participants are not fans of your page but the products you are giving away. Keeping an active page with a lot of info but no real followers. This means you don’t really have support and weakens your social presence. To avoid this, it’s important to build a slow and steady network of real people.

6. “Set It and Forget It” Mentality

Your company’s Social media page will not run on its own. Creating it and setting it up is just one of the many steps that you have to take to create a fan base. Engaging your fans requires investing precious time to update your page. Ignoring this aspect will not just hurt your brand’s fan growth, it will also affect your existing relationship with your customers especially those who are expecting timely responses to their posts and questions.

7.  Forgetting to Diversify

What kinds of content are you sending out to your social media channels? If you’re always posting the same thing, especially if it’s always self-promotional your followers won’t be engaged. Increase their engagement by making sure to vary the type of content you post, such as:

• Your own blog posts, articles, videos, and photos.
• Links to external content that is relevant to your audience’s interests.
• Shares or retweets from other players in your niche.

8.  Posting content for the sake of posting content

Low-value content is the problem of the many so-called online experts that tell you to post contents all the time if you want attention. It is true that posting content regularly will get your attention. But, unless the content is amazing, it will be ignored. The time you spend on that is wasted.