Have you been using social networking sites for your business without seeing positive results?

If you have developed and implemented a social media marketing strategy but failed to yield any good result, chances are you’re doing something wrong.

The following are common social media marketing mistakes that most marketers make and how you can rectify them.

1. No Editorial Calendar

If you really want to achieve your content marketing goal, you should create an editorial calendar for your social medial marketing plan. An editorial calendar will allow you to schedule your marketing strategy. You’ll be able to come up with lots of marketing ideas that you can implement with the passage of time.

An easy way to create a social media marketing editorial calendar is by merging it with your blogging schedules. Your blog posts will serve as the topics to be discussed on your social networking outlets.

For example, if your products or services target new mothers, and you publish an article about the health benefit of breastfeeding, the article topic can serve as the theme for discussion on your social networking sites with a link pointing back to the article on your blog.

Furthermore, don’t base your editorial calendar on the content that you create. Include relevant and valuable content from other people that you deem your readers will find useful.  

2. No Update of Blog and Social Network Accounts

Your blog is an integral part of your social media marketing plan. The more you update your blog, the more you’ll have to discuss with your followers on your chosen social media sites.

Update your blog with relevant and valuable content regularly. Admittedly, creating the same content format can be daunting. For this reason, create and publish various content such as articles, videos, audio files, case studies, ebooks, white papers and podcasts. You’ll have more content to publish and share with your followers.

3. Pushing Products or Services to Followers

Ideally, social networking sites are meant for building relationship with customers and potential clients. This takes a lot of time and effort to achieve. One of the things that can discourage people from following you on social sites is when you push your products or services to them.

Your followers expect you to provide value for them by giving out helpful information that they can utilize to improve their lives or businesses. Quit pushing your offers and start providing value for your followers.

4. Not Listening to Followers

To find out what your customers and potential clients really want, it’s crucial that you listen to them. Besides sharing valuable information with your followers, listen to them, too. It will allow you to discover the problems they want to solve and help you create content that’s tailored to their needs.

Answer your followers’ questions as soon as possible. Delaying to provide answers to their questions or inquiries may demonstrate that you’re only interested in making money but not to help. This might make them stop following you.

5. Not Tracking Performance

Obviously, there are several social networking outlets on the Internet but not all of them are effective. Track the performance of your chosen networking sites to discover the most effective ones. Instead of wasting your precious time on all of them, you’ll be able to focus on the efficient ones and discard the ones that prove ineffectual.

Link your social networking sites accounts with your website analytic tool. It will help you track the performance of each social site. Ask your web master to help you with this.

Like any other business task, there are right and wrong ways of utilizing social media for marketing your business. If you’ve used several social media marketing tactics under your belts but failed to record any positive result, the above tips may help you reap good results for your efforts.

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