The usage of social media can turn out to be a great marketing tactic for small-budget startup companies, but implementation cannot always be guaranteed to be infallible. It is a bitter truth that about 9 out of 10 startups fail due to usual reasons we have all heard countless of times. Although a startup doesn’t make you a perpetual failure, it can be a blessing in disguise if you don’t make the same mistakes as well. Watching out for notorious blunders can make or mar your reputation and business potential prior to getting started with it.
Below is a list of the most prevalent mistakes startups make with the usage of social media:
1. Starting in the absence of a clear-cut plan
As a start, mounting a viable and strategic social media plan allows you to create a fundamental framework upon which to anchor and put in place your social media endeavors. In essence, this will serve as a beacon to figure out the right path to take to reach your specific target.
So, you need to ask yourself the questions below before scheming your startup’s social media plan:
- Who is your target audience?
- How do you intend to connect with your audience?
- How would you streamline your social media efforts with your traditional marketing mix?
- Who do you think can effectively take charge of your social media campaign?
- What are the objectives of your social media efforts?
- And how do you plan to assess the success of your social media campaign?
In the meantime, it will be helpful to compare your social media strategy with others to figure out which changes to make while waiting to get answers to the questions above.
2. Poorly-timed posts on social media platforms
This is one of the major errors startups are prone to commit and is more prevalent with the failure to recognize customers and their behavioral patterns on social media. The key solution to this is the adequate timing of posts to connect and interact with their clients which are most likely to create fruitful results. Therefore, if your business is based on UK time and you post or tweet around 11 p.m., then you would have missed the “sweet spot” timely posts has to offer. As a result, posting timely and significant posts while taking customer behavioral patterns into consideration are parts of the indispensable facets of every social media campaign.
3. Breaching established rules of social media etiquette
It is unadvisable to start a social media campaign unless you understand the fundamental rudiments or the rules guiding it. Below is a list of rules that I use:
- Initiate conversations by asking provocative questions. Trends are a great way to stay relevant and increase interaction between your followers on social media. Likewise, day by day trends ensures you don’t run out of ideas by providing you with innovative and mind-bugging fresh content to post on social media platforms.
- Follow-backs are great; don’t follow and unfollow people indiscriminately. Following people on social media should be because you have regard for the content shared by them as significant and not because the person has more followers or with the aim that retweeting them will get you more followers.
- No man is an island: promote others alongside your brand. It is important to mention and share contents from people or their businesses several times but you must also self-promote yourself with a short mention to share the benefits of the mention with your readers.
- You can’t be everywhere, take things one step at a time. There are several social media networks on the internet, attempting to be on every one of them can turn out to be futile in the long run. So, direct your efforts to be on about four or less social media networks where there is a huge base of your target audience. This will allow you to easily manage and share contents to get your users buzzing.
4. The absence of metrics to assess the success social media efforts.
While it may seem impossible or unrealistic to measure conversation rates, other things such as the size of a network, the number of mentions your brand gets within a particular time and the traffic each network generate for your website can be calculated easily. Metrics are important to measure the success or otherwise of your social media campaign over a week, month or year. Below are tools that can keep you in the loop on the progress of your social media campaign:
- SocialMention is a free-to-use social media search engine which eliminates the need for you to monitor notifications endlessly by sending you alerts of mentions about you and your brand online.
- Simply Measured is a paid tool that can make an aggregate of interaction per post and tweet distribution for each country as an Excel report.
- PageLever is also a paid tool that can effectively evaluate impressions for your Facebook Page over a defined or specific period.
5. Your competitors are relevant to your business, don’t ignore them.
It is important for your business to kW your competitors and what they are up to. This can be done by signing up as a fan on their social media accounts and website to monitor their activities.
It is also necessary to pay attention to fans comments and responses even before your competitor take note of them as they can be useful to improve your business. Scenarios listed below are very likely to occur when you know your competitors and what they are up to:
- What features are your competitor’s fan yearning to see added to a business or product? Can you use this information to your advantage by adding the feature to an existing or new product?
- If they have been praising you and your competitors, have you considered including some of the praises you received in your adverts? I think you should.
- What is the emotional response of fans to your competitor’s products? Do you feel the same way they do?
As said earlier, a majority of startups fail for making similar mistakes other startups have made in the past. Your startup can be an exception and turn into something big with a great social media strategy. Avoiding the mistakes discussed earlier will not only boost your online presence but will also show you how you can improve your efforts and prove your plan to be a cost-effective marketing approach in the long run.