Priyanka Shitole
Social media hold great influence that can empower the voice of your organization or the product you are selling. With such a widespread and vast medium of marketing, the chance of making mistakes and the risk of believing in myths are high.
Here are some common mistakes that many companies make:
- They spend meaninglessly on social media.
- They create social media profiles, but don’t keep up with the interactions.
- They neglect to define their target audience.
- There is no strategy or contingency plan.
- The focus is too much on advertising and not enough attention on the feedback or reactions.
Having multiple Facebook or Pinterest accounts or Twitter handles won’t give your product or service an advantage over tough competition; neither will getting your friends and family to be your primary fan-base. Like traditional marketing, social media marketing needs a marketing plan, too. It needs thorough research and systematic strategic implementation of the plan. Since search engines change their algorithms periodically, having a contingency plan is key.
The best solution is to ask an expert. Our social media experts at Words and Pictures, for example, do exhaustive research, sketch a plan, refine it, and re-refine it! Once the blueprint of the ideas and strategies is in place, we execute it very methodically. Then we wait for the results. Once we have enough stats to evaluate, we compare the expected results for each step of the plan with the actual statistics. We then make a decision to either continue with the strategy or to refine it, or if substantial change is needed, we make the required changes on the fly. Either way, we continually strive to get even better results, achieve higher targets, and execute different strategies to boost the sales for our clients. It’s an ongoing process. Social media marketing needs alert vision and constant refinement in the plan of action to get better results each time.
The next time you hear someone claiming to show you social media marketing results in a span of a few days – beware! It’s one thing to get good results once, and quite another to do it consistently!