5 Mistakes to Avoid as a Social Media Manager

June 29, 2015COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT, FACEBOOK, INSTAGRAM, LINKEDIN, SNAPCHAT, SOCIAL LISTENING, SOCIAL MEDIA, SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY, TWITTER

There’s a lot more to this social media game than you may realize.

 

Being a social media manager takes the full cooperation of all parties involved and the necessity of communication between them, as well. Running a social media page, no matter the channel, requires a great deal of patience, experimentation with content and posting times, and taking on multiple perspectives depending on how many accounts you run.

 

Take note of the misconceptions you’ll soon encounter in our latest blog as they are commonly seen and experienced by novice social media managers who think social media is as easy as post-click-results. With these five tips, you avoid the mistakes that so many others have experiencing, including the accounts you run that are on your back for not having everything you post immediately going viral.

 

1. Not Checking the Numbers

 

Numbers can’t lie, check the scoreboard.

 

There are plenty of tools, some even for free, at your fingertips that can divulge a wealth of information about your social media standing. You can check out all of the tools we utilize at One Twelfth here.

 

For social media, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn all provide comprehensive listings of your posts and how they performed.

 

Facebook and Twitter even go as far as to provide you with demographics of your audience, as well as the ability to export your page data and post data. You can select any range of dates and analyze how your page or your posts performed, namely with stats, such as post clicks, that go below the surface of simply likes, comments and shares.

 

All of these tools are at your disposal for free and are designed to help you get a better understanding of your audience so you can appeal to them better in future posts. With stats, you learn what types of posts work and what day and time they work best.

 

Without them, the already unpredictable guessing game of social media becomes even more of a crapshoot.

 

2. Not Knowing your Audience

 

Once again, tools, such as Facebook insights, easily allow you to get a glimpse at your fanbase.

 

We observed the demographics of a diaper rash cream’s demographics and reached these conclusions, simply from a page of Facebook Insights:

 

  • Our fanbase mainly are women
  • Our fanbase is located in Miami
  • Our fanbase is between mid-20’s and middle-aged

 

Those three points tell us the type of posts we need to make and the perspective we need to have. Create content that would be geared towards them. If they don’t work at first, keep experimenting with different forms of copy and imagery. Social media, even if you invest and do your research, is unpredictable and it could take some time to find that desired sweet spot.

 

Just keep experimenting, stay consistent, and have perspective.

 

3. Lack of Creativity

 

Have perspective when you’re creating your posts, and ask yourself these three questions.

 

“Would I click on this?”

 

“If I was scrolling through my feed, would this make me stop and at least absorb the information I’m seeing?”

 

“Is this interesting enough for my audience to click on?”

 

Being a social media content creator is about having a keen, diverse perspective that taps into the mindsets of the audience you’re trying to reach. If you run a page that sells baby products, think of what a new mom would want to see. If you run a page that sells two-way radios in bulk, think of what a public safety agency or factory manager would want to see.

 

4. Lack of Boosting

 

Imagine you’re in front of a crowd of 42 million people and they’re all yelling at the same time. They’re all trying to say their own unique quip or sales-pitch, but you can’t make out what any individual is saying.

 

This is what Facebook is like when you don’t invest. You are competing with 41,999,999 other Facebook pages for the attention of users. They may be selling different things than what you’re selling, but they’re all still in the same boat as you: Vying for attention with a limited voice.

 

Many businesses go into social media assuming it’s just a cheap, easy way of advertising. ‘Make a post about your business and wait for the likes and praise to roll in’ is the common belief of social media rookies. But if it were that easy, then everyone would have thousands and thousands of likes and would be flourishing, despite the fact that they’re competing with over 40 million other pages for attention.

 

Just as you would with your business that you want to succeed, invest. It doesn’t take much. You can shell out a little more for ads on the right column or news feed that will last a few days, but you could also invest as little as $1 into a single post.

 

The investment may not even be that much, but you get to target a specific interest (Rather than just shooting your post out for anyone to read, you can target it to your audience, who are more likely to actually read and digest it) and reach at least a couple hundred people.

 

Treat social media as a serious part of your business and you’ll find yourself investing because it’s the smart thing to do.

 

5. No Planning

 

Bouncing off the previous point of taking social media a lot more seriously than you would think, treat growing your social media influence as you would starting your business.

 

What does every business need to start out with? An idea and a solid foundation with a plan they could execute on.

 

If you’re going to make posts for your brand’s page, do you want to think of something new every day and have to rush it out before it’s too late? Or would it be wiser to take a day or two to think about two weeks’ worth of posts?

 

Further building on this point, you would be able to plan for upcoming holidays, as well as the more ‘quirky’ ones, rather than creating one the day before or even the day of.

 

If you want to go even further, and this is what we do at One Twelfth, you can create themes for each day. For the Motorola Solutions account we ran, we used Thursday for the usual #TBT, but also used Friday for User Engagement posts because of the stats we analyzed.

 

Because we had so many verticals and products to promote with that account, we had to find a way to create some sort of even distribution, with a greater emphasis placed on the verticals that would receive the most attention (Once again, something we learned from our research into the numbers).

 

Our idea was to give each vertical a day of the week. Since we had too many verticals, we would alternate verticals. For instance, we would have the Law Enforcement and Utilities verticals on Tuesday, with Law Enforcement one week and then Utilities the next.

 

Without a researched plan, we would never have been able to execute on giving each vertical the attention it needed, instead of distributing an allotted date to each one. This was also a wise thing to do because it made it a lot easier to track what posts and verticals worked, as well as what time and day of the week they worked on best.

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