4 Reasons Businesses Fail on Social Media

Only 23.3% of marketers have the ability to measure the impact of social media quantitatively. The rest? They can only feel a qualitative impact or are unable to prove that social media has any benefit.

If you use social media to build your business, you know that getting results from your marketing efforts is more difficult than it looks. Misconceptions and wrong practices stop people from seeing real results from social media.

This article lists 4 social media misconceptions and how to avoid them.

1. No Clear Goals or KPIs

You can achieve different goals with social media.

According to Social Media Examiner’s Social Media Marketing Industry Report, marketers see the following results from social media marketing:

1. Increased exposure
2. Increased traffic
3. Loyal fans
4. Marketplace insights
5. Leads generated
6. Increased thought leadership
7. Business partnership growth
8. Improved sales

Needless to say, you need to determine which goals are most important in your social media plan and align your efforts with those goals.

For example, in order to increase exposure, you need to increase your follower base, impressions, and mentions. It would be wrong to post your sales pages upfront and expect people who don’t know you yet to buy from you.

To measure the success of your efforts, you need to measure the right KPIs (key performance indicators). For awareness campaigns, the right KPIs might be profile visits, post impressions, and the number of likes, followers, shares, and mentions.

The KPIs for increasing engagement, generating leads, and finally improving sales are metrics such as the number of clicks, sign-ups, and downloads.

If you still don’t know what goals and KPIs you should pursue, consider taking advantage of an expert consultant.

2. Wrong Social Media Platform

It might be a bad idea to be present on all social media networks.

For one thing, keeping up with each network and producing content for each is hard work; for another, content standards on each network differ, and the audiences on each one might have different expectations.

To have a general understanding of what content performs well on each social media platform, check out the following suggestions from Entrepreneur:

• Facebook: Curated content and videos
• Google+: Blog posts that you want to rank on Google
• Pinterest: Step-by-step photo guides and infographics
• Instagram: Stories, high-res photos, and quotes
• LinkedIn: Professional content, jobs, and company news
• Twitter: News, GIFs, and blog posts

Once you know the demographics of the users on each network and what they’re interested in, you can create great content for them.

For example, 88% of people aged 18-29 are on Facebook, while 77% of high school students use the platform. Pinterest users are predominantly women: 45% of the total number of online women use Pinterest.

Why bother using the platforms your target audience won’t be on? You want to choose the social media platforms that your customers use most.

Learn more about the latest social media trend - BeReal.

3. Posting Random Content

Another misconception about social media is that you can post random content and get results.

You should post different kinds of content depending on the goals of your campaigns.

Hubspot identified content types based on the concept of the sales funnel.

Depending on what stages your customers are in or what goals you want to achieve (awareness, evaluation, purchase), you should post different kinds of content.

• Top of the Funnel: In the "awareness" phase, people look for education and insights. You can use whitepapers, e-books, tip sheets, checklists, how-to guides, or educational webinars.
• Middle of the Funnel: This is the "evaluation" phase, where people tend to do a lot of research on your product to find out if it’s a good fit for them. You can use product webinars, case studies, samples, FAQs, data sheets, or demo videos.
• Bottom of the Funnel: This is the "purchase" phase, where people are quite sure of the value of your product and look for an easy purchasing experience. You can use free trials, live demos, consultations, estimates, or coupons.

4. No Plan for the Customer Buying Journey

There is typically a distance between the awareness phase and the purchase phase of the customer buying journey, and you need to fill that distance by providing suitable content and engaging people.

You can’t assume people will buy from you in their first interaction.

In order to fill this gap, you need to know your audience and their buying journey (i.e. how they move from the awareness phase to the purchase phase).

Your customers’ demographic features such as gender, age, and work are a goldmine here. You need to have a good understanding of their behavioral features as well. Their lifestyle, habits, interests, pain points, and micro-moments are more important than you could guess – you want to connect with your customers and appeal to them in the buying journey.

Here are some questions to determine your customers’ preferences and their buying journey:

• What are your customers’ most important issues and concerns before they turn to you? As Wolters Kluwer explains in an article about how to start a consulting business, people are driven by the need to transform their current state to a desired state. What are your customers’ desired states?
• Where do they look for answers to their issues? Do they tend to start with social media, search Google, or look up to some people such as bloggers and influencers?
• What personality types do they have? Do they have an analytical perspective, or do they tend to get emotional and intuitive when making a decision?
• What devices do they prefer to do research on: mobile, PC, etc.?

The greatest source for finding the answers to these questions is your customers.

Make professional surveys using SurveyMonkey or Google Forms, send them to your customers (through your email list or social media), and use the information to provide a great customer experience throughout their journey.

Once you determine how your customers use social media (for example, whether they use it to find products or to validate their product choices), what types of content they prefer to see, and when and on what devices they use social media, you can more easily provide support throughout their journey.

Find Success on Social Media

It doesn’t make any sense to keep repeating the same social media marketing mistakes again and again.

Social media analytics tools enable you to monitor your success or failure in social media marketing and choose the right actions for the future.

To have the right social media marketing strategy, you need to avoid some misconceptions and wrong practices.

• Decide on the goals you want to achieve and determine what KPIs you should monitor
• Focus on the social media networks your customers hang out on most
• Research your customers’ demographic and psychographic data
• Produce content based on their interests and preferences
• Create a detailed map of your customers’ buying journey and how they move from the awareness phase to the purchase phase
• Keep your website's design efficient to improve conversions for the visitors from social media
• Provide a great customer experience

About the Author

Mostafa Dastras Marketing Blogger, Copywriter, & Content Marketer

Mostafa Dastras has written for important companies such as HubSpot, WordStream, SmartInsights, and MarketingProfs. What keeps him up at night is how he can help his clients increase sales with content marketing (or how people can grow an email list). Visit his blog, Live a Business Life, or connect with him on LinkedIn to get him to write for you. 

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