3 Social Media Mistakes That Are Holding You Back
Whether you are brand new to social media or a seasoned expert, it can often become overwhelming with the constant updates and latest trends, especially when, as soon as you master one, a new platform becomes the ‘thing.’
Here we break down three common errors people tend to make when learning or elevating their social media strategy.
Mistake Number 1: You Have Your Notifications On.
While this may seem counterintuitive, especially when all you’ve ever heard about social media is to be social, active, and be at your customer’s fingertips. But, at the end of the day, social media apps like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook are designed for one thing: to be addictive.
Any social media manager will know how easy it is to find yourself down a rabbit hole after going on the app to look at something and find yourself somewhere entirely different; you think, how did I get here, and where did those last 10 minutes go? That’s why it is essential to be strict with your time and set boundaries. Schedule a specific time in your calendar for dedicated social media check-in and engagement. You stop all other work and go into each channel you manage, check messages and notifications, reply to comments, and engage with each audience.
It is doubtful that there will be an emergency that someone needs to reach you over social media. Make sure that the contact details are up to date on the page’s profile so that if there is a need to, they can contact you or the client by phone or email.
Having your notifications off allows you to stay focused on your other tasks and streamline your social media management and engagement workflow. When you are ‘on,’ you can spend more time creating and building genuine relationships instead of engaging randomly. An example social media management engagement schedule could look like this:
- Spend 10 minutes reading and replying to your notifications and messages
- Spend 20 minutes engaging with 10-15 competitors’ accounts or accounts with the same ideal audience as you
- Spend 10 minutes liking and engaging with the comments on your previous posts
Block out 30 minutes, and depending on the level of engagement, you may want to do this once in the morning and once in the evening. For accounts requiring a much larger engagement level, you may schedule 20 minutes to recheck messages and comments during the middle of the day.
Setting yourself strict boundaries and blocking out specific times will help refrain you from being sucked into the apps and therefore help manage the feeling of being overwhelmed and allow you to keep on top of what feels like a never-ending stream of notifications, which in turn will enable you to be more present on social media.
Mistake Number 2: You Post Too Often
You’ve finally got your business off the ground, it’s no longer a pipedream, and you’ve landed your first customer. You registered the Instagram handle of your business name ages ago, but now you have to start posting. You’re excited, to begin with, and you have all these great ideas. So you post every day, sometimes even twice a day, but then your first client was so satisfied with your work they told their friends, and their friends told their friends and all of a sudden you haven’t posted in months, and all you can think about it is the algorithm and how it is going to punish your account.
We are here to tell you that don’t worry; there isn’t a magic number on how often you need to post. You just need to find what is suitable for you.
While it is essential to be active and present, being consistent is more important, and you need to post quality over quantity.
When starting out, or even when rethinking your strategy, give yourself a time goal because how often you post depends on how long it takes you to create or gather your content and how much time you have to dedicate to creating social media content and publishing, on top of social media engagement, all while running your business.
So first, you need to decide whether you have, say, 30 minutes, 1 hour or 5 hours per week to dedicate to social media, and then you need to work out what you can do in those 30 minutes, one hour or five hours. Whether that's filming, editing, and posting one or more videos; creating Canva graphics; snapping a photo on your phone and posting it on the fly, or taking a picture of your professional camera and then editing it in Photoshop; you can schedule it using a social media scheduler for maximum audience engagement. Of course, some people are quicker than others and can do more in one hour than others can do.
The critical point is to start small and build yourself up. Then, as your skills progress, you will get quicker, and things will get easier, but it really is the age-old “learn to walk before you can run.”
If in five hours you get one post out a week, that is your benchmark, and you progress from that, but if you try to set yourself five posts a week, you will never be able to run a business as well as posting on social media, believe us, we run a social media business.
Mistake Number 3: You Aren’t Using Data Insights.
Many social media manager’s reading this will have had the same experience where they have put a considerable amount of time and energy into a piece of content and proudly put it out into the world for it to get less than average engagement. Then the piece of content you whipped up in seconds as a last-minute “I need something to fill this gap” pops off with your audience, and you are left scratching your head thinking, “huh - what happened there?”
The mistake you are making is not utilizing the free and handy tools at your fingertips; Facebook and Instagram Insights.
You don’t need to guess what’s working and what’s not; you have cold hard data to see what resonates with your audience and what doesn’t. Answering this question is more important than ever, with the algorithm moving towards favouring saves and shares instead of the more apparent comments and likes.
‘Hidden’ data like saved and shares may not be as evident to you, and the post you thought was the best performing with numerous likes might be falling somewhere in the middle. The informative carousel with a vast amount of saves in the ‘insights’ tab is actually your best performing post of the month and precisely the type of content your audience wants more of. Without that data, you might have written off producing more carousels and stuck to what you thought was best.
Data is only as good as the insights it provides. Numbers are only meaningful when we put them into context. You need to know what it all means based on what you want to achieve. For example, are your top priorities increasing your community or driving traffic to your website? The numbers in your report reflect the key indicators of progress, but the actual value is in telling a story about the numbers.
While seemingly overwhelming at first, social media management is entirely manageable as long as you have a strong strategy, boundaries, and a willingness to learn. Here at Custom Fit Online, we offer different levels of social media management packages; get in touch to learn more.