Social Media has grown over the years to become a taken-for-granted omnipresence in our lives. Extending beyond socializing into becoming a status symbol, a pedestal of fame, or a platform for business support. Brands have been on this bandwagon, creating content and leveraging communities in order to grow their social presence and their brands. However, as much of a “success platform” Social can be, it can also be a wasted effort if not done just right. Below are 4 pitfalls of Social Media that brands fall into, causing them to lose faith in Social Media as a driver for success

  1. Social Media as the hallmark of success.

Some brands fall into the pitfall of considering Social Media to be THE activity that will make their brand go big. This can be true, but no brand is going to gain major success focusing only on Social Media with disregard towards other marketing activities. We no longer live in a world where the average consumer is amazed by a social media post, or where consumers will trust brands simply due to their excellent engaging content. Social Media has reached a point of maturity that allowed selective perception and extensive scrutiny to dominate the consumer’s digital behavior. In a sense, marketing a defunct or underperforming product on Social Media will not create a legacy of high turnover, brand trust, or consumer affinity (No matter how many million followers you have). On the contrary, if you promote your products on Social, the product’s flaws are also being promoted. The recipients of these promotions have easy access to online platforms where they can tell the world how “not-so-great” their experience with your company has been. If your product does not offer satisfactory results, promoting it on social opens doors towards negative reviews and viral brand dis-trust. Optimize your offering, then offer it to the world.

2. Imagining the wrong audience

A tremendous amount of time and resources are spent within a marketing department to closely encompass the exact target audience for any specific offering or brand communication. When it comes to social, many brands imagine their target audience based on their brand offer & positioning and through that, create targeting matrices that cater to these audiences. The issue here would be, that the audience you imagine might not be the exact audience that drives sales or brand value. The behavior of your potential customers offline might not be exactly matched with their behavior online. Further, understanding the targeting algorithms on any platform you use will allow you to better gauge the responsiveness and relevancy of your targeting scheme. Testing, multiple targeting sets, and optimizing variables is key.

3. Disintegration of data flows

Social Media is now a bigger part of the digital ecosystem. With flows of data occurring from Social, CRM, websites, display, and even offline activities, it is imperative to integrate all dataflows into actionable opportunities. With advances in tracking, remarketing and data capture, the most successful brands action these data into effective remarketing and exclusion lists that enable them to deliver the right product to the right individual with the highest possibility of conversion. Every piece of data that is generated from your activities, can be turned into a valuable asset. A marketer needs to be able to understand those flows, how they feed into each other, and how to leverage them in order to reach the most relevant and conversion-ready audiences.

4. Vanity metrics as a sign of success

Who of us doesn’t like “likes”? The most omnipresent indicator of engagement and affinity towards a post or a brand has historically been the Like or Favorite. But what does it mean to a business? Aside from the cool numbers, and the bragging rights – “Likes”, if not converted to action, do not mean much for a business. The fact of the matter is, since Social Media targeting platforms drive impressions towards individuals that are “More likely” to take a specified action (depending on your selected objective), vanity metrics may not mean much. If 1,000 people like my post, but no-one clicked through to my website, and my offline sales data does not reflect an increase in sales or revenue – my success was only getting people to engage with my content, with no measurable impact on my business. However, if you consider those who have engaged with your content as being a captive audience, and you then remarket to them with specific posts carrying a conversion CTA – you might be able to turn likes into a data asset that supports your bottom line! Clicks to websites, lead form submissions, and conversions are solid indicators of performance.

 

All in all, when building a brand on Social, a marketer needs to encompass the entirety of the brand elements in order to drive success. Any content that’s seen on the feed, should be driven and produced after many processes and decisions have been taken to ensure success for the brand and its business. If you feel unsure about how on-point your social media management is, give us a shout and write to us on hello@socialize.ae!