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How Not to Make Social Media Optimization Blunders and Optimize Your Returns. For internet marketing, social media optimization or SMO is the best method of exposing your brand, website traffic, and user engagement. But like with every other marketing campaign, there are errors that even the best marketers and entrepreneurs can make. And while these errors are small, they can make a huge difference in how successful your social media campaign will be.
Whether you’re an online marketer looking to optimize your strategy to be most effective or an entrepreneur looking for more aggressive growth, keeping an eye out for these mistakes—and how you can avoid doing them in order to rise above them—will set you on your path to success. So let’s begin and discuss the most common social media optimization errors and what you can do to correct them.
1. Not Setting Clear Goals
One of the largest mistakes that most entrepreneurs and marketing experts commit is diving into social media optimization without an aim in mind. Do you wish to establish brand awareness? Drive website traffic? Drive engagement? Without a clear-cut aim, your social media plan gets jumbled, both in terms of finances and time.
How to Avoid It
Before posting content, your objectives need to be clearly defined. Specific: such as increase site traffic by 20% for the next quarter or acquire 500 new subscribers in one month. By holding measurable objectives, you will also be able to better measure progress and know if what you’re doing is directed towards your corporation’s overall goal of marketing.
2. Underestimating Analytics’ Power
You might be posting all day, all week, on social media, but are you measuring post performance? Unless you are looking at engagement, reach, click-through, etc., you may be missing out on critical information that would enable you to change your approach. The thinking being that posting often will somehow increase your success.
How to Avoid It:
Use social media analytics tools to measure your performance. Each of the networks comes with built-in analytics which can provide you with a goldmine of insights on the type of posts to get the highest results with your users. Taking a look through these numbers daily, you’ll be able to tweak your posts for maximum payout and drive increased traffic to your site. You can use Google Analytics, Hootsuite, or Sprout Social to glean actionable insights and sharpen your method over time.
3. Not Optimizing for Every Platform
One of the largest social media optimization errors is taking a one-size-fits-all strategy on all platforms. Each social network has unique rules, algorithms, and user habits, so there is no single solution. What works on Instagram will not work on LinkedIn, and vice versa.
How to Avoid It:
Sync your content to where you’re posting it. On Instagram, visual and story; on LinkedIn, business advice and posts. Sync your timing on each platform as well. For instance, the early afternoon is generally best for posting on Facebook, while LinkedIn posts are best placed on morning weekdays.
By syncing your content to each platform’s unique strengths and user behaviors, you’ll increase engagement and drive more targeted traffic to your site.
4. Overlooking Consistency in Branding
Inconsistent branding across your social media will confuse your audience and erode your credibility. When your voice, image, or message do not match the core identity of your company, it produces an asymmetrical experience for your audience that lowers your audience’s trust in your brand.
How to Avoid It:
Ensure your visual identity is consistent wherever you find yourself. That is, your logo, color scheme, typography, and anything else visual. Your voice and tone, also, need to be consistent whether you’re tweeting or blogging. Consistent, clear branding will get your brand more comfortable and reliable, eventually getting people on your site.
5. Not Engaging with Your Audience
Social media is a conversation. Writing and failing to respond to your audience is the costliest blunder. Failing to reply to comments, questions, and direct messages will make your brand seem out of touch or disinterested in receiving feedback. Social media lovers want to communicate with brands in real time, and an inability to respond is going to hurt your social reputation.
How to Avoid It:
Reply to comments, mentions, and messages promptly. Engage with your followers by asking them questions, stirring debate, or sharing user-generated content. Answering your fans not only builds the rapport but also results in greater chances of getting them pointed in your direction.
Conclusion: Is Your Social Media Strategy Set for Success?
Social media optimization is a great source of traffic driving, branding, and communication with your users. But like as we know it, there are some shortcomings standing between your success. By having well-detailed goals, keeping track of the performance, optimizing your content to each of your media, consistently branding yourself, communicating to your audience, making it mobile-oriented, and following good CTAs, you are able to counter these deficits and make your social media campaigns a success.
