It’s time to face facts, Social Media is more than just a fad and it is certainly a key tool in your marketing armoury. So why is your Social Media “not working”?
Firstly the one thing that unites social media owners everywhere at one time or another is the phrase “it’s not working”. What exactly isn’t working is always a moving target, but lets assume it refers to our most important metric as marketers…you aren’t getting the interactions/enquiries/sales you should do.
So why isn’t your social media working?
1. You have more than one audience
It’s easy to think you are targeting one audience, that everyone you’ll be producing content for via your social media channel is the same…but you’re wrong.
Every business has many different audiences and sometimes it’s easy to forget the work you’ve done in identifying those for your other marketing channels. Churning out tweets and updates covering the same narrow areas will reduce your audience in real terms.
Recently with one of our small business clients we identified 35 different audiences for their social media content, all with different content requirements. This also applies across different social media platforms too.
The key is to identify your audiences, their potential content requirements and the relevant platforms as part of your Social Media Strategy and plan your content accordingly. Develop your plan to ensure you are giving all of your audiences a snippet of good stuff regularly.
2. You’re sharing the same content as everyone else
OK, so you’ve found the funniest image you’ve ever seen and it matches perfectly for your industry so you share it. Then you find another one, and another one…oh and one of your partner businesses has found something too, so you share that. That’s all well and good but have you ever done just a little bit of checking to see if that fantastic content you’ve found is already doing the rounds.
This is a tricky one in that it is great to share relevant content, but it can be a turn off if a few of your audience have already seen that 18 times in the past week.
Try to keep your content research wide ranging, relevant and always keep an eye out for those gold nuggets that aren’t already in wide circulation. If you can’t, at least put your own spin on it.
3. Spelling and Grammar Errors
Everyone errs from time to time, to err is human after all. Yet our tolerance level is rather low when it comes to bad spelling or grammar errors in even the shortest of tweets. Of course this isn’t a call to make every update a piece of prose worthy of the great bard himself, but at least make sure that you give your updates a spell check and if you have words like “their, there or they’re” make sure they are correct. Nothing appears to raise the heckles quicker than a spelling or grammar error or two (or too???!!).
Spell check and grammar check your updates. We can live with compressed words, just make sure the full ones are all spelt correctly and make sense.
4. Trying to Recreate Past Glories
3 months ago you created the single most successful update ever on your Social Media platform. However, since then you’ve been trying to recreate this, so much so the majority of your updates are following the same structure, timing and (almost) content. In the age of analytics it is easy to allow the data to dictate the content. In other words, using the data as the bible when it comes to planning, placing and writing your content. The simple advice remains, good content is king, analytics help to guide the planning and execution.
Use analytics wisely to plan where and when your best content should go out, but treat it as a friendly guide, not the dictator of your every social media move.
5. You’re not Engaging with the world around you
There are two big words in play here, Social and Media and we sometimes forget that. Social Media is a media platform, a broadcast platform if you will which we all use increasingly to take and make the news. It is also Social, one (very large) social environment where two-way conversation, gossip, and reaction is all firmly embedded. As social media users it is vital that you keep an eye on the world around you (even if that is just your social media world). Platforms like Twitter give you a massive clue what’s going on with their trends updates. Use these wisely and make sure you regularly review any automated updates. Brands and individuals have made huge errors with tweets/updates (sometimes deliberately) timed when a huge disaster is taking everyones attention, or even just missed the general mood of the hour.
Ensure your updates are inclusive, interesting and be interested in your audience and those that interact. Keep an eye on world events, celebration days and even TV schedules to make sure your content doesn’t jar with the social mood of the hour.
Social Media magic is harder than it looks and does take work, but it isn’t rocket science. This list could’ve been even longer and it would be great to hear your thoughts.
Simon Brooke is a Director and creative thinker at Happy Creative, a strategic marketing and creative branding agency based in Blackpool, Lancashire. To learn more or contact us please go to www.happy-creative.co.uk or @Happy_Creative
