9 social marketing mistakes you should really try to avoid making

College kids, company employees, soccer moms, and stay-at-home moms do one thing when they turn on their computers (or smartphones) — log into their Facebook account and start liking and sharing everything their friends have published. This has sort of become a routine for most of us. It has in turn changed the world of marketing altogether.

While a few years ago everyone was focusing on targeted ads through advertising networks as Google Adsense, they are now turning to social media.

Facebook’s advertising platform is now so popular due to its capability to better target the users. A user base of one billion from all over the world doesn’t hurt either. If done properly and intelligently, Facebook can transform any business. Still, a few are using the social network in the wrong way, causing more bad than good. Let’s look at a few social media mistakes that you could avoid pretty easily.

1. Targeting the wrong network

Look at the top social networks: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google Plus, etc. Each of these social networks has its own specific use. Company HRs looking for professional resumes should probably be more focused on LinkedIn rather than Pinterest. There has even been a recent recruitment for a six-figure job from Twitter. An online shop selling stuff for ladies can get better business by targeting a Facebook interest group.

Google Plus is Google’s social network and it has come up with a specific target group consisting of online bloggers and freelance writers. Hence, if you are looking for good authors for your company, you can probably find them through Google Plus’s authorship program.

Hence, it has to be understood that each social network has its own use and you have to target the one that is most important for your cause.

2. Not branding properly

Social media is perfect for your branding needs. A very important aspect of social media is its capability to go viral. Share a really fascinating and funny image on Facebook or Instagram and you can see it making rounds gathering likes in a crazy fashion. When you are starting a strategy on your choice of social media, develop a page that really emphasizes your brand insignia.

Imagine for instance that you are marketing a movie production company through YouTube. You build up a basic YouTube channel and put up some videos and trailers of your movies. What if you use a generic image instead of your brand’s logo? Or if you come up with a mashup that blends your insignia on an uninspiring background? That kind of marketing is bound to fail. Make sure your visitors know your brand and make them respect it.

3. Sharing unrelated stuff just to get likes

If you are trying to develop your Facebook page by sharing a lot of stuff that you think people would be interested in, then you should really know how to do that. As an analogy, think about a publication like the BBC. The BBC has gone into our lives as a source of high-quality news about things that matter. Now, think about another source like TMZ.com or the Daily Mail. These publications are targeting a different kind of audience altogether. If the BBC lowers its standards and starts sharing pictures of celebrities’ famous bums for a few viral shares and likes, then it simply loses its value and respect.

This is so with all kinds of companies and services. If you are marketing something, stick with it, and do not stray to some other unrelated stuff that you think may gather you some likes.

4. Wrong timing

If you are into breaking news, then the timing has to be almost perfect. Only a person really well versed with the industry can publish news at appropriate times. If you are reviewing an event that happened a month back, you should have something new to add to it, or don’t attempt it at all.

5. Retweeting without anything new

One thing that you can find quite often is people tweeting links from popular news sites and publications. All they are doing is giving something to their followers to think about. Most of the people simply tweet a link or make a retweet to keep their Twitter accounts active and alive. Here is one example:

“Samsung released galaxy S 4 in New York : .”

Most of the tweets are in this fashion. If a person wants to know what is happening, they can gather that information from a professional news site rather than from your lame tweet. Instead of doing this, make the tweet interesting, with something unique that you add to it. Such as:

“Samsung released Galaxy S 4 and it doesn’t have an 8-core processor as many people believe.”

If you cannot insert a link, don’t do it. Just speak what others will find unique and interesting.

6. Personal tweets

This particular thing has been mentioned over and over again. Do not tweet your personal things if you are not a celebrity, someone like Justin Bieber. And if you are a celebrity, you don’t have to tweet your personal stuff; others will do it for you! In short, you would never have to tweet about your personal things. Imagine nobody knows about you, and all your tweets are about when you go to bed, what you had for lunch, and who you met today, then people will soon get bored and stop following you.

7. Don’t attack the competition

Attacking your competition through social media is another important thing to avoid. If you believe your competition is getting ahead of you, just ignore it and simply concentrate on improving your side of the business. By putting up strategies like this Microsoft attack on Google, you are misrepresenting yourself to the consumers.

One thing: you are letting your customers know that you are desperate, frustrated, clueless, and weak. That sends a really bad message to your customers, a really bad one. An important thing that builds a company’s reputation is the respect the customers have toward the company. Many customers stick with companies like Microsoft and Apple because they love the personality of these companies. They like how steady and dependable their products are. By launching hate campaigns, they can easily destroy this trust.

8. Not connecting properly

If you have a Facebook page going on and you have people messaging and commenting on it, be active and reply to those messages. A huge part of your customer service has to be taken online via social media. There are major advantages to this. With social media, word-of-mouth marketing is big, much bigger than the real world. If you share a solution to an issue via your Facebook profile, that solution can be immediately shared by the people viewing it with their friends, and it could go viral. After a while, this kind of interactions can change the way your customer service works.

Several companies still do their customer service through product forums. Social sharing of solutions can be built into these forums to enable better resolution of issues.

9. Not tracking statistics

All social media sites can give you the statistics of what is happening on your profiles. Within Facebook, you can learn about who is sharing your stuff and what draws attention through the Page Insights. Within Twitter, you can get important information about retweets, mentions, direct messages, etc. You can even track a page’s success by looking at how many tweets or Facebook likes it gets. Not giving attention to these statistics is a very wrong thing to do. Only by knowing what works, you can continue to provide what works.

Social media can work wonders if you care about it and do it the right way. If not done properly, you will simply waste a little while of your valuable time. What I have given here are only a few tips, and there are many other important things that can go wrong. Take care of your social profiles and make them stand out.