5 Major Social Media Mistakes That Keep Your Content from Growing

Social Media Mistakes

Nowadays Social Media Marketing is a major part of any marketing strategy. Various businesses create profiles on social media platforms to reach out to their target audience and promote their products by publishing content. While it might seem like a pretty straightforward thing that does not have a lot of challenges at the first glance, in reality, SMM is a rather complicated art that requires a certain degree of skill and knowledge. In the modern world, it is no longer enough to simply create interesting content, but you also need to know how to deliver it effectively. Below are the 5 major Social Media mistakes that keep your content from growing and how to fix them:

#1 Choosing the Wrong Time to Post

No matter how interesting, relevant and overall great your content is, it may only yield a very limited amount of actions if posted in the middle of the night. Unless you are a business that deals with urgent news that cannot be postponed till later to be published, you might want to wait till the peak usage times to share your posts with the audience.

Indeed, appropriate timing of publications is one of the things that can drastically change the level of engagement and general exposure your content receives. There are some clear set rules in Social Media Marketing that you need to follow in order for your content to grow. One of them is complying with the peak usage times on various social media platforms. Therefore, if you want to get the most eyes possible on your content, you might want to study the behavioral patterns of your target audience: when do they scroll through their news feed? When do they like the most? When do they engage in a conversation with other users in the comments section?

All of the aforementioned questions will not only help you identify the time frame that would be the most suitable post in order to achieve the best results, but will also provide you a rather comprehensive portrait of your average target audience social media user. For instance, from gathering this kind of information, businesses can gain a better understanding of what types of content get better recognition at what times. These would vary for different businesses e.g. e-commerce organizations would likely see a rise in engagement upon daily and seasonal shopping patterns, while a corporate thought leadership account would experience an increase of content interaction at the start of the workday when their target audience is searching for the motivation to get them through the day.

In order for you to maximize the number of people viewing your content, you might use the findings of the various studies that sought to identify the best times to post on major social media platforms.

 Audience

Facebook

According to Sprout Social, businesses may expect to get the most consistent engagement on weekdays from 9 a.m. to 3 p. m. The best time to publish your content on Facebook would be on Wednesdays at 11 a. m. and 1 p. m., as this is when the engagement is at its highest. Avoid posting in early mornings and evenings, before 7 in the morning and after 5 in the evening, as this is when the engagement plummets.

Instagram

In 2024 Instagram implemented a major change into its algorithm, automatically prioritizing certain posts in the user’s feed as opposed to the reverse chronological order. However, there are still some patterns that allow brands to reach an audience more effectively. For instance, the most consistent engagement can be received when posting on Tuesday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 3 p. m. with the best time to post being Wednesday at 11 a. m. and Friday at 10-11 a.m.

Twitter

Twitter is best known for its accessibility and short texts. More than 500 million tweets are sent on daily basis, making it a platform that draws a lot of engagement. Nevertheless, there are still times when the engagement is peaking, Wednesday at 9 a. m. and Friday at 9 a. m. Apart from that, Tuesday is a favorable day to tweet, while Saturday gets the least engagement. The most consistent engagement is received Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 4 a.m.

#2 Using the Platform for Wrong Purpose

In order to avoid making this mistake, businesses need to set a clear social media marketing objective. There needs to be an understanding of who they are trying to reach out to, as this would determine the following actions in regards to the choice of the main social media channel. Of course, a business may choose to set up an account on multiple platforms and therefore increase its social media presence. However, in the long run it is not profitable and could actually buffer the growth of the business’ content. The main reason for this is that if you thin yourself out too much, you may lose the focus. Hence, it is better to identify your target audience and choose the main social media platform accordingly, based on the demographic metrics of each of the channels. You can examine each of the major social media platforms and learn more about the type of people signed up to it based on their age, income, gender and many other factors.

It is common knowledge that the functionality of various social media platforms differs, and appeals to certain groups of people over others. Once you have identified the product you are trying to market, and the type of content you are willing to spread, you can continue to selecting the platform that is suited best for your specific case.

It is incredibly important to choose the appropriate social media platform based on the extensive market research. Instead of going with the most popular platforms, you should always take the data into consideration. While a certain platform might be well-populated and have a wide range of active users, it could be the case that the percentage of users that actually fall into the category of your target audience is not that high, hence the effort will be in vain.

Moreover, if you try to concentrate on way too many platforms at once, it may lead to you dedicating way too much time to the social media marketing without yielding the desired results. Besides, if one of the platforms gets a bit more outdated, you will be more likely to forget about it, and leave it hanging on the web, without making any further uploads. Having this ‘dead weight’ can be seen by the public as a sign of neglect, so you would rather delete the accounts that are not viewed as useful anymore.

#3 Ignoring Your Target Audience

Ignoring Your Target Audience

Having an established conversation with your business’ target audience is essential for the growth of your content. No one can do your brand better justice than the people who are genuinely interested in your publications and are willing to share them with their friends and followers. This is why businesses need to take the preferences of their audience into consideration, and adjust their posting plan accordingly. However, according to Brandwatch, 96% of people discussing brands online do not actually follow those businesses on social media. Therefore, it is vital for the business owners to not only keep an eye on their own page, but also monitor other sources. By doing so, you would be able to track what the audience thinks of you and your brand, get a better overall insight and react to the opinions accordingly.

Nowadays, it is extremely easy to carry out the monitoring process through utilizing social listening tools. By customizing one of such tools to give you a heads up whenever a mention of your business or product appears on the web, you can gain a better understanding of how your business is perceived by the general public.

#4 Duplicating the Content for Different Social Media Channels

This mistake often appears when brands run way too many profiles on different social media platforms, and try to update all of them regularly. It is often the case that trying to stay relevant, a lot of businesses prefer quantity over quality, and do not really alter the content they post to suit the nature of the platform they post it to. In fact, not only can it be seen as somewhat lazy, but will also not bring the desired results. While it does sound counter-intuitive, as you will distribute the content around more platform and theoretically gauge greater exposure, in reality it works in a different way. When you create one type of content, you have a specific platform that you are going to post it on in mind. Therefore, you choose the format and the audience you are targeting to be the best fit. If you share the same content on a different platform, it may not get the same reaction there just because of not being entirely appropriate for the public.

#5 Focusing on Yielding Shares Instead of Trying to Increase Traffic

A lot of content makers wrongly assume that receiving enough shares and likes are the main goal of the post. However, for a business account it is different: what you are really looking for is getting traffic. If a considerable amount of people like your post, but no one will click on the link, you will end up not having visitors on the site. In order to combat this problem, you need to optimize your posts and follow some basic rules.

For example, the optimal the optimum place to leave a link on Twitter is right at the 25% mark.

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